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Mashed Potatoes
To five riced potatoes add three tablespoons butter, one teaspoon salt, few grains pepper, and one-third cup hot milk; beat with fork until creamy, reheat, and pile lightly in hot dish.
A four-line recipe that assumes you already know how to boil and rice a potato. The proportions are the point, and they still hold.
- What "five riced potatoes" meansFive medium potatoes, boiled in salted water until tender, drained, dried briefly over low heat, then pushed through a ricer while hot. That works out to roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb, or about 4 cups riced.
- Choose a mealy potatoRussets or another high-starch variety rice into dry, fluffy threads. Waxy new potatoes tend to turn gluey under the same treatment, which is a common way this recipe goes wrong.
- Hot milk, not coldThe instruction to warm the milk is not decorative. Cold liquid drops the temperature of the mass and makes it harder to beat smooth, so you end up overworking it to compensate.
- Beat with a forkA fork or wooden spoon only. A food processor or immersion blender ruptures the potato cells and releases their starch, producing a stiff paste in seconds.
- ReheatingA minute or two over low heat, stirring, is enough to drive off surface moisture and bring it back to serving temperature. It should not sit and dry out.
- SeasoningOne teaspoon of salt for two pounds of potato is on the modest side if the boiling water was unsalted. Taste before it goes to the table.
- YieldServes four to six as a side dish.
Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896) is remembered chiefly for insisting on level, standardised measurements at a time when recipes still ran on handfuls and teacups, and this entry shows the method applied to something almost too plain to write down: three tablespoons of butter, one teaspoon of salt, one-third cup of milk, all countable. Potato ricers were in use in American kitchens by the late nineteenth century. The closing direction to "pile lightly in hot dish" asks that the food look aerated rather than packed, and warmed serving dishes are called for elsewhere in the book.