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Mashed Potatoes
Mrs. F. D. J.
Peel the potatoes, and let them stand in cold water for half an hour; then put in the steamer over boiling water and cook them until mealy and quite tender. Have ready an earthen basin, or a bright tin pan, into which you will put your potatoes, so that while mashing and preparing, they can be kept on the stove and hot. Now mash well and finely with the potatoe-masher, and then season with salt; allow a generous piece of butter, and lastly, add a tea cup of rich milk; mix altogether well, and then take up on a deep dish.
There will now be three or four ways to finish this, and which are, first by putting a little butter on the top, after. smoothing nicely, and putting it a moment at the mouth of the oven, and then serving quite hot; or you may put it into the oven, which should be quick and hot, and bake the crust of a rich brown. Or, again, the top may be scored a golden brown with steel bars made for this purpose. Or, lastly, after mashing the potato, put it into a mould and shape it; then loosen it from the mould and turn it on to a flat piece of sheet iron, large enough to cover the bottom of the mould with handles at the sides. Then have ready hot lard in which you immerse the moulded potato and fry a rich golden brown. Take out and with a knife under, slide carefully on your platter. Garnish the dish around with curled parsley leaves. If the potato is put in the oven to brown, it should be put in a baking plate and may be sent to the table in the dish in which it is baked, with a knitted cover over.
A method rather than a formula: the original gives no potato quantity and assumes a stove with a warm surface to work on. The instructions still hold up, and two of the four finishes are worth reviving.
- QuantitiesNo weight of potato is given. A period teacup is usually reckoned at somewhere between 4 and 6 fl oz, so call it half to three-quarters of a cup; that suits roughly 3 lb of peeled potatoes with 3-4 tablespoons of butter, serving six, adding more milk if the mash is stiff.
- Steaming, not boilingThe steamer is the point of the recipe. Steamed potatoes absorb far less water than boiled ones, so the mash takes butter and milk without going slack. Use a floury variety -- russet or King Edward -- and cook until a skewer meets no resistance.
- The half hour in cold waterSoaking peeled potatoes draws off surface starch and keeps them from discolouring while you get the steamer going. It is not essential, and long soaking leaches flavour; thirty minutes is about the limit worth bothering with.
- Keep everything hotThe instruction to mash in a warmed pan on the stove is the hinge. Cold milk into cooling potatoes gives a stodgy, claggy mash; gumminess proper comes chiefly from overworking the starch. Warm the milk, warm the bowl, and work quickly.
- "Quick and hot" ovenRoughly 425F, bearing in mind the book gives no temperatures and such terms were never precise. Browning should take something like 10-15 minutes; a slower oven risks drying the dish out before the crust colours.
- The steel barsHeated iron applied to the surface to scorch it, the same principle as a salamander. A kitchen blowtorch or a hot overhead broiler will brown the top, though only a heated bar or torch will give the scored lines.
- The moulded, deep-fried versionEssentially pommes duchesse handled in one large piece. It works far better with an egg yolk or two beaten into the mash to bind it, and the surface must be dry and well chilled before it meets the fat, or it will slump and spit. Frying a single large moulded mass in a domestic pan is awkward; small shaped cakes are more manageable.
- "A knitted cover"A woollen cosy laid over the baking dish on its way to the table. A folded tea towel does the same, though it will soften the crust the oven just gave you.
Mashed potato appears in English and American cookery from the late eighteenth century onward. The elaboration here -- four finishes, a mould, a salamander, a garnish of curled parsley -- reads as later nineteenth-century work, and the initialled contributor is characteristic of the community cookbooks of that period; *The Home Cook Book*, published in Toronto in 1877, was compiled from recipes contributed by women in Toronto and other Canadian towns, many of them identified only by initials. The recipe assumes a range with a hot oven, a warm surface to work on and somewhere to keep dishes standing, and a table where even potatoes were expected to be *presented*. The browned, moulded and fried treatments belong to the same broad repertoire of stiffened, shaped and coloured mash that English cooks knew as pommes duchesse, though no direct line of descent can be shown from this page. The salamander -- a heated iron used for glazing and browning before broilers existed -- was standard equipment in professional and well-appointed kitchens, and the name, taken from the mythical fire-dwelling lizard, survives on restaurant equipment lists to this day.