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Potato Pyramids
To one cup of well-seasoned mashed potatoes add one egg yolk. Beat until light. Take up by tablespoonfuls and form into pyramid shapes by pointing one end, and broadening the other as a base to stand on. Set them on a buttered tin, brush over with beaten egg, and when ready to serve, brown lightly in the oven. These make an attractive garnish for meat dishes. Mashed potatoes are more easily handled if shaped directly after a meal is over, while still slightly warm.
A garnish rather than a side dish, and the technique hinges entirely on how dry the mashed potato is. Anything loose or buttery will slump in the oven.
- Start with stiff potatoLeftover mash that was made with a lot of milk or cream will not hold a point. If yours is soft, dry it out in a pan over low heat for a few minutes before adding the yolk, or work in a spoonful of dry mashed potato flakes.
- Shape while warmThe closing line is the real instruction. Potato at room temperature or straight from the refrigerator crumbles and cracks; warm potato is plastic and takes a clean point. Shape the pyramids the day before if you like and refrigerate them on the tray.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe says only "brown lightly," with no oven grade given. Since the aim is surface colour rather than cooking through, a hot oven for a short time suits the purpose better than a slow one.
- The egg washThe recipe calls simply for beaten egg. One egg beaten with a teaspoon of water brushes on more evenly than egg alone and gives a better gloss; a second coat after the first has dried will deepen the shine.
- YieldA cup of mash is roughly sixteen tablespoons, so taking it up by the tablespoonful as directed gives something over a dozen small pyramids.
- ServingThey are structural, not saucy. Set them around a roast or a braise where they can catch juices, and get them to the table promptly, as they soften as they cool.
- Piping insteadThe same mixture, slightly softened, goes through a star tube for duchesse potatoes. Hand-forming achieves much the same effect without a pastry bag.
Shaped mashed potato belongs to the wider family of pommes duchesse, the egg-enriched potato purée that French professional kitchens piped into borders and rosettes and glazed with egg wash; a hand-moulded pyramid is the domestic cook's version of the same idea. A cup of yesterday's mash, which would otherwise be reheated apologetically, is turned into something that reads as deliberate garnish, and the thrift is invisible on the plate. Books of this kind, common in American and British households in the early twentieth century, have often been read as concerned less with poverty than with respectability, treating waste as a failure of management and offering the cook ways to make the second appearance of a dish look like a first.