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Princess Potatoes
Take one pint of mashed potatoes; one tablespoon of melted butter; one egg, well beaten. Cut the potato into strips two inches long, one inch wide and one-half an inch thick; or, if hurried, the potatoes may be made into flat balls one-half an inch thick. Dip the strips or balls first into the melted butter and then into the egg, and lay them with a knife in a lightly buttered tin pan. Cook in a hot oven for twelve minutes, and serve.
A simple way of turning leftover mashed potato into something with edges and a browned surface. The recipe assumes a stiffer, drier mash than most people make today, which is the whole difficulty.
- The mash must be dry and coldYou cannot cut soft, milky mash into two-inch strips. Use potatoes mashed with little or no liquid, then spread the mixture about half an inch thick on a plate and chill it for an hour before cutting. Baked or riced russets behave far better here than boiled waxy potatoes.
- A pint of mashed potatoesTwo cups by volume, roughly a pound of cooked potato, from about 1¼ lb raw. Measure it packed rather than heaped loosely.
- Hot oven425-450F. Twelve minutes at that heat is about right for browning something already cooked; at 350F they will simply dry out without colouring.
- The dipping orderButter first, then beaten egg, as written. The egg is the outer coat and is what sets and glazes in the oven, so do not reverse it. Brush rather than dunk if the strips are fragile.
- Pan and spacingButter the sheet lightly and space the pieces so the sides are exposed; crowded pieces steam. A metal sheet pan gives a better bottom crust than glass.
- Lay them with a knifeNot fussiness. Lifting an egg-coated strip on the flat of a palette knife or offset spatula is the easiest way to move it without tearing off the coating.
- SeasoningThe recipe gives no salt, so it presumably assumes the mash was already salted. If it was not, season it before shaping, since seasoning after baking can only sit on the surface.
- YieldEnough for three or four as a side dish; at the dimensions given a pint of mash makes something over two dozen strips, or eight to ten flat cakes.
"Princess" and "à la princesse" were common garnish names in late nineteenth-century professional cookery; in classical usage "à la princesse" was commonly associated with asparagus tips and sometimes truffle, though the name was also attached more loosely to dishes given a neat, uniform, slightly elegant treatment, and a shaped and glazed potato fits that looser pattern. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, aimed its cook book at middle-class households running a kitchen without a trained cook, and recipes like this one show the priorities: reuse yesterday's mashed potato, get a browned crust from the oven rather than a pan of frying fat, and give the result a name worth writing on a menu card. The alternative of "flat balls" for the cook in a hurry is a small piece of honesty about how such books were actually used.