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Potato Pie (Common-sized tea-cup of grated)
A common-sized tea-cup of grated raw potato, a quart sweet milk; let milk boil and stir in grated potato; when cool add two or three eggs well beaten, sugar and nutmeg to taste; bake without upper crust; eat the day it is baked. This recipe is for two pies.-Miss Sarah Thomson, Delaware.
A thin sweet custard thickened with raw grated potato rather than flour or cornstarch. The recipe assumes you know how a custard pie behaves, so the two things it leaves out are the oven temperature and the sugar.
- Grate straight into the hot milkRaw grated potato discolours quickly once it is exposed to air. Grating directly over the pan of scalded milk and stirring as you go avoids the problem.
- A common-sized tea-cupTeacup measures in books of this period run somewhere between half a cup and a full cup; about 3/4 cup of grated raw potato, loosely packed, is a reasonable reading. A starchy baking potato gives a smoother set than a waxy one.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, as distinct from the buttermilk or clabber that appears elsewhere in the book. Whole milk; a quart is 4 cups.
- Sugar to tasteFor the full quart of milk and two pies, 3/4 to 1 cup of sugar is in the right range. Judge it in the cooled potato-milk mixture before the eggs go in.
- Let it cool before the eggsThe instruction is not optional. Beaten eggs stirred into near-boiling milk scramble, and no amount of straining will bring the texture back.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Treat it as any milk-and-egg custard pie: 425F for the first 15 minutes to set the pastry, then down to 325-350F until the filling is done, roughly 30 to 40 minutes more.
- Judging donenessThe center should still wobble as a single mass when the pan is nudged; a knife inserted an inch from the edge comes out clean. A custard baked until the middle is firm will crack and weep as it cools.
- No upper crustA single bottom shell only. Partly blind-baking it before filling is worth the trouble with a filling this wet.
- Eat the day it is bakedSound advice with a starch-thickened custard, which turns grainy and begins to leak liquid overnight. The recipe makes two pies, each serving six to eight.
The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the great wave of American compiled community cookbooks, in which recipes arrive signed and placed, as this one does, with a contributor's name and home state. Potato pies of this kind"grated raw root cooked into milk, sweetened, spiced and baked in a single crust"are cousins to the older English and Irish potato puddings, where potato stood in for the breadcrumbs or ground almonds of earlier custards. The potato here is doing the work of a thickener, and the result is closer to a lightly bodied baked custard than to a dense pie filling. The nutmeg, grated fresh from the whole nut, is the period signature.