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Potato Pudding (Boil until white mealy)
Boil until white, mealy, and very tender some potatoes; rub them finely washed through a colander; to a pint bowl of them while hot add one quarter of a pound of butter, and mix well; beat the yolks of six eggs well with one pound of fine sugar; add the grated rind and juice of one lemon, and then the beaten whites; stir lightly in, and bake in pie plates lined with paste; eat cold,
This is a sweet baked custard in a pastry shell — closer to a lemon chess or sweet potato pie than to anything savoury. The hinge is texture: the potato must be dry and floury and pushed through the sieve while hot, or the finished pudding turns gluey.
- "A pint bowl of them"That means a pint by volume of the sieved potato, about 2 cups packed, which takes roughly 1 lb of raw potatoes. Use a floury baking potato; waxy varieties will not go mealy and will produce a heavy, sticky pudding.
- Rubbing through a colanderA ricer or a drum sieve does this faster and better. Work the potato while it is still steaming hot so the butter melts into it, and never beat it in a mixer or food processor — worked starch becomes paste.
- Old weightsA quarter pound of butter is 1/2 cup (115 g). A pound of fine sugar is about 2 1/4 cups (450 g). "Fine sugar" here means finely ground white sugar, closest to modern caster or ordinary granulated.
- The sugar is very high by modern tasteA pound of sugar to a pint of potato and six yolks gives a distinctly candy-sweet pudding of the period. Reducing it will change the set as well as the flavour, since the sugar is part of what keeps the custard tender.
- "Paste"Plain shortcrust or a lard-and-butter pie pastry. There is no blind baking in the original; a chilled shell and a preheated metal or glass plate on the lower rack will keep the base from going soft under a wet filling.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given; the cook was left to judge her own range. Bake at 350F. The filling should be set at the edges with a slight wobble at the centre, roughly 35 to 45 minutes for a shallow plate.
- YieldEnough for two 9-inch pie plates, or one deep one, giving 12 to 16 small servings. The instruction to eat it cold is not incidental — it firms as it cools and the lemon comes forward.
- Folding the whitesBeat them to soft, not stiff, peaks and fold in at the last moment. They lighten the custard rather than leaven it, and an over-beaten meringue will separate into a foamy layer on top during baking.
Sweet potato puddings of this kind are chiefly an eighteenth-century English form, dating from a time when the potato was still novel enough to be treated as a luxury ingredient fit for sugar, butter, eggs, lemon and sometimes brandy or rose water. The formula — a pound of sugar and half a dozen yolks, baked in pastry, eaten cold — is the same one that produced carrot pudding, sweet potato pie and the lemon-scented "chess" pies of the American South, all of which are often linked to the medieval custard tart. Its appearance in The Home Cook Book, the Toronto compilation first published in 1877, shows how long the type survived in print, though much of that book was in fact lifted from the 1874 Chicago Home Cook Book rather than gathered only from local housewives.