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Potato Balls
Form any well-seasoned mashed potatoes into balls the size of English walnuts. With a teaspoon press a hollow in the top of each ball. Fill the space with one teaspoonful finely minced ham.
Brush the balls with egg beaten with a little milk or water. Place on a greased pan and brown in oven. These make a good garnish and relish for a platter of chops.
A straightforward way to turn yesterday's mash into a garnish. The only real variables are the moisture of the potato and the heat of the oven.
- Oven heatThe original gives none. Use 425F: hot enough to set the egg wash and colour the outside in 15-20 minutes before the balls slump.
- SizeAn English walnut in the shell is roughly 1 1/4 inches across, so roughly a tablespoon of potato per ball. Expect somewhere between two and three dozen balls from a pound of mashed potato.
- The potato must be dryThis is the hinge. Cold leftover mash made with much milk or cream will spread on the pan. If it feels loose, work in a beaten egg yolk or a spoonful of flour, and chill the shaped balls for 20 minutes before they go into the oven.
- The hollowPress the well with a wet teaspoon so the potato does not stick, and stop short of the base. Filled to the rim, the ham browns and crisps; buried, it just warms through.
- HamCooked ham, minced fine — the point is seasoning rather than substance. Dry-cured or country ham is salty enough that the potato should be seasoned lightly to compensate.
- Egg washOne egg beaten with a tablespoon of milk will glaze the whole tray. Brush the sides as well as the top, or the balls colour unevenly.
- ServingThree or four balls per person as a garnish around chops. They are best straight from the oven; reheated, the crust softens.
Recipes for using up leftovers were common in cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period in which households that cooked large joints and roasts faced the daily question of what to do with what remained. Mashed potato was one standard vehicle: bound with egg, shaped, and browned, it reappeared as croquettes, borders piped around a platter, or small balls like these. The instruction to use them as "a good garnish and relish for a platter of chops" fits a style of service in which a meat dish came to the table dressed rather than plated individually, with the garnish expected to be edible. The stuffing of minced ham does double duty -- it uses up a second scrap and supplies salt and fat that cold potato lacks.