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Potato Puffs
S. S. Pierce.
Take cold roast meat (either beef, veal or mutton); clear it from gristle; chop fine; season with pepper and salt; boil and mash some potatoes, and make them into a paste with one or two eggs; roll it out with a little flour; cut it round with a saucer; put your seasoned meat on one-half; fold it over like a puff; turn it neatly round, and fry it a light brown. Nice for breakfast.
A Victorian breakfast dish built on the previous day's roast: a mashed-potato dough folded over chopped meat and fried. The whole thing succeeds or fails on how dry the potato is.
- Dry the potatoesThis is the hinge. Use a floury potato (russet, Idaho), bake or boil whole in the skin, and let the drained flesh steam dry in the hot pan for a minute before mashing. Wet potato will not hold a shape in fat and the puffs will collapse or absorb grease.
- The pasteReckon on one egg to about a pound of mashed potato, plus enough flour to make it rollable — roughly 2 to 3 tablespoons. Add flour a spoon at a time; too much and the puff turns leathery rather than light. Chill the paste for half an hour before rolling and it will handle far better.
- "Cut it round with a saucer"A Victorian tea saucer is about 5 to 6 inches across, which gives a half-moon roughly the size of a modern hand pie. Roll the paste about a quarter-inch thick.
- Sealing"Turn it neatly round" probably means crimping or rolling the curved edge over on itself. Brush the rim with beaten egg or water first; potato dough has little gluten and may spring open in the fat otherwise.
- FryingShallow-fry in about half an inch of fat at 350–360F, three to four minutes a side. Lard, beef dripping or a neutral oil all work; butter alone will brown too fast. Fry a test puff first to check the paste holds.
- The meatCold roast beef, veal or mutton chopped fine — not minced to paste. If the meat is very lean, moisten it with a spoonful of leftover gravy or stock, or the filling will be dry and crumbly. The meat is already cooked, so the frying is only to brown the crust and heat through.
- SeasoningPepper and salt alone is thin by modern taste. A little grated onion softened in butter, chopped parsley, or a dash of Worcestershire suits the period and the dish.
- YieldA pound of potato and roughly 8 oz of chopped meat makes six to eight puffs — breakfast for three or four.
This is leftovers cookery raised to a named dish, and it belongs to a whole Victorian genre — rissoles, croquettes, cutlets, patties — devoted to the Monday problem of the Sunday joint. Cold roast meat was a household constant in an era of large joints and limited means of keeping them, and cookbooks of the 1870s carry dozens of ways to send it back to the table looking like something else. The potato-and-egg paste here is essentially the same construction as an Irish potato cake or a Cornish-style turnover with the pastry replaced by mash, which was cheaper and used up another leftover at the same time. The attribution "S. S. Pierce" is worth a note: The Home Cook Book was assembled from contributed receipts, and S. S. Pierce & Co. was a well-known Boston grocery house of the period, though whether the credit here is to the firm or to an individual contributor of those initials is not clear from the book itself. Either way, "nice for breakfast" reflects a time when the first meal of the day routinely included fried meat.