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Riced Potatoes
Force hot boiled potatoes through a potato ricer or coarse strainer. Serve lightly piled in a hot vegetable dish.
Two sentences and no measurements, but the technique carries the dish: riced potatoes are boiled potatoes made to look and eat like snow, with nothing added at all.
- QuantityFigure one medium potato per person, or about 6 oz raw weight. Riced potatoes lose their loft within minutes, so scale to what will be eaten immediately rather than making extra.
- Which potatoUse a starchy variety — russet or a floury white — so the strands stay separate and dry. Waxy red or new potatoes turn gluey in a ricer and will not pile.
- Cook them dryBoil in salted water until a skewer meets no resistance, drain, then return them to the dry pan over low heat for a minute to drive off steam. Wet potatoes rice into paste.
- Hot means hotThe one condition the recipe actually specifies. Rice the potatoes as soon as they are drained, straight into a warmed dish; potatoes that have cooled are stiffer, harder to press, and give a denser result.
- If you have no ricerA coarse strainer worked with the back of a large spoon does what the book says, and a food mill with the widest plate works better still. A food processor is the one tool that will ruin them.
- Do not stir"Lightly piled" is the whole point of the dish. Once the strands are in the serving dish, leave them alone — any smoothing or pressing collapses the texture into mashed potato.
- ServingThey go out plain here: nothing is added in the recipe itself. A pat of butter on top and a little salt and pepper is a reasonable addition and will melt down through the pile.
Ricing was one of several ways American cookery around 1900 treated the boiled potato: the same potato, pushed through a perforated press so it fell in short threads that held air. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book carries a long run of potato recipes — boiled, riced, mashed, Duchess, Lyonnaise among them — set out as a graded sequence of what one cheap vegetable could be made to do, which suits the school's teaching method. Potato ricers were among late-nineteenth-century kitchen tinware, sold alongside colanders and Dover egg beaters, and they survive in modern kitchens largely for gnocchi and very fine mash. Part of the appeal of riced potatoes seems to have been visual: in a period that prized white food served in hot covered dishes, a loose snowy pile signalled a light hand.