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Delightful Pudding
One quart of boiled milk, put one half of a tumbler of mashed potatoes, one half tumbler of flour, and a small piece of butter; when cool add three beaten eggs; bake half an hour. To be eaten with sugar and cream or milk.
A thin baked milk pudding thickened with leftover mashed potato as much as with flour — closer to a loose custard than to a steamed pudding. Two things decide whether it works: the milk must be off the boil before the eggs go in, and the flour and potato must be smooth before that happens.
- The tumblerA tumbler in an 1870s American kitchen is a plain drinking glass of roughly 8 fluid ounces, so half a tumbler is about 1/2 cup. Half a tumbler of flour is around 2 1/4 oz; half a tumbler of mashed potato is about 4 oz, best measured lightly packed.
- Cool means warm, not cold"When cool add three beaten eggs" is the hinge. Add the eggs to boiling-hot milk and they scramble into threads; let the mixture drop to about 120F, then beat the eggs in off the heat. Tempering a little of the warm milk into the eggs first is safer still.
- Smooth the base firstWhisk the flour into the mashed potato with the butter before combining with the milk, or work it into the hot milk in a slurry. Dry flour tipped into a quart of hot milk will lump and the lumps will not cook out in half an hour.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no oven direction at all; a moderate oven, around 350F, suits it. A buttered 1 1/2 to 2 quart dish is right for a quart of milk plus the additions; at that depth half an hour will set the edges and leave the centre barely trembling. A water bath gives a smoother set if your oven runs hot.
- DonenessJudge it as a custard, not as a cake: a knife inserted an inch from the edge should come out clean while the middle still wobbles. It firms as it cools. Baked until a centre skewer is dry, it will weep.
- Butter and salt"A small piece of butter" is about 1 tablespoon. The recipe gives no salt and no sugar at all — the sweetening comes at table, but a good pinch of salt in the batter is what keeps it from tasting flat.
- Yield and servingEnough for six small servings. The recipe directs only that it be eaten with sugar and cream or milk poured over; grated nutmeg is a plausible period addition if you want one.
Potato puddings run right through nineteenth-century American and British household cookery, and this is the thriftiest branch of the family: not the rich grated-potato-and-wine puddings of the earlier English books, but a way of turning yesterday's mashed potatoes and a quart of milk into a dessert with only three eggs. Potato starch swells readily and sets softly, so the result is softer than a flour-only milk pudding. The Home Cook Book is one of the charity cookbooks compiled by committees of local women, contributed recipes gathered up for sale in aid of a cause, and its recipes have the compressed, assumed-knowledge quality of notes passed between people who already knew how a milk pudding should behave. Hence the vagueness that would never survive an editor now: a tumbler for a measure, "a small piece of butter", and an oven described only by the half hour it takes.