Home › Vegetables › Mashed Potatoes
Mashed Potatoes
Pare and boil till done, drain, and mash in the kettle until perfectly smooth; add milk or cream, and butter and salt; beat like cake with a large spoon, and the more they are beaten the nicer they become. Put in a dish, smooth, place a lump of butter in the center, sprinkle with pepper; or add one or two eggs well-beaten, pepper, mix thoroughly, put in baking dish, dip a knife in sweet milk, smooth over, wetting every part with milk, and place in a hot oven twenty minutes. To warm over mashed potatoes, season with salt and butter, and a little cream or milk, place in a buttered piepan, smoothing and shaping the top handsomely, and making checks with a knife; brown in a stove or range oven; place tin on a second dish and serve on it.. Or, add a little cream or milk to cold mashed potatoes, press evenly in a basin, set away, and in the morning slice and fry.
A method rather than a formula: the book assumes you know how many potatoes you want and gives no quantities at all. The useful detail is in the finishing, and in one instruction that modern cooks should treat with care.
- The beating, with a caveat"Beat like cake with a large spoon" holds for hand tools. Potato starch cells rupture under high-speed shear, so a food processor or immersion blender can turn the same potatoes to glue very quickly, and a stand mixer worked hard will do the same. A wooden spoon, ricer or masher can be worked as long as you like.
- Choose a floury potatoRussets or another high-starch baking potato mash light and absorb butter and cream; waxy new potatoes stay dense and go sticky under vigorous beating. Cut them to even pieces and start them in cold salted water so they cook through evenly.
- ProportionsFor 2 lb of potatoes, roughly 1/2 to 3/4 cup warm milk or cream, 3 to 4 tablespoons butter, and 1 1/2 teaspoons salt. Warm the dairy before adding it; cold milk cools the dish and makes it harder to beat smooth.
- "Sweet milk"Simply fresh unsoured milk, distinguished in period books from buttermilk or clabbered milk. Ordinary whole milk is the equivalent.
- "A hot oven"425 to 450F for the baked version with eggs. Twenty minutes at that heat gives a set, browned top; the egg is what lets it hold the shape and the knife-marked checks.
- Browning the leftoversUnder a modern oven the top browns unevenly at best. A few minutes under the broiler after the dish is heated through gives the crust the recipe is after, and brushing the surface with milk or melted butter helps it colour.
- The pressed-and-fried versionCold mashed potato pressed into a basin overnight firms enough to slice about 1/2 inch thick. Fry in butter or bacon fat over medium heat and leave the slices alone until a crust forms, or they break up when turned.
- Yield2 lb of potatoes serves four to six as a side dish.
Mashed potatoes appear in nearly every nineteenth-century American household manual, and this entry is typical in devoting as much space to the second and third days as to the first. The egg-bound, oven-browned version is close to what French kitchens codified as pommes duchesse, and the knife-checked top seems to be a decorative habit that turns up in English and American cookery alike; the checks catch the heat and brown in a pattern. The Dixie Cook-Book, compiled in the 1880s, belongs to a period when potatoes were cheap and cold storage was not, and the assumption running through the page is that nothing gets thrown away. The instruction to serve the browned pie pan on a second dish is a reminder of how much of this cooking happened in a wood- or coal-fired range.