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Mashed Browned Potatoes
Prepare same quantity mashed potatoes. Place in a baking dish and with the blade of a knife neatly smooth all around. Lightly egg the surface with the knife, set in the oven to bake for ten minutes or until a nice brown colour. Remove and serve.
A finishing method rather than a dish in its own right: mashed potato smoothed flat, glazed with egg, and browned. Two lines in the original need translating.
- "Same quantity" refers to the previous entry"Same quantity" refers to a preceding entry -- The recipe carries no quantities of its own and assumes the cook is working from the mashed potato recipe printed elsewhere in the book. Scale it to whatever batch of mash you have; the original supplies no weight or yield.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the original leaves the judgement to the cook, who is told simply to bake "until a nice brown colour." In a modern oven a hot setting, in the region of 425-450F, is the usual way to get colour inside ten minutes; a moderate oven will take longer.
- "Lightly egg the surface"This means glazing with beaten egg, applied with the flat of the knife blade rather than a brush. One whole egg beaten with a teaspoon of water is ample; too heavy a coat sets into a rubbery skin instead of a gloss.
- The potato must go in hotTemperature of the mash -- The recipe says nothing about this, but ten minutes is only long enough to colour the top. If the mash is cold, expect to give it longer so the middle heats through.
- A broiler does the same job fasterUnder a hot grill the glaze takes colour in three to five minutes. Watch it continuously; egg goes from gold to burnt in under a minute at that distance.
- Dish and depthUse a shallow gratin dish and keep the potato no more than an inch and a half deep, so the ratio of browned crust to soft interior stays in balance.
Browning a dish of mashed potato under a glaze of egg belongs to the professional French repertoire that shaped Anglo-American cookery books around 1900 — the same egg wash that gilds a pastry crust. Filippini's International Cook Book (1906) came out of decades in New York restaurant kitchens, and this entry reads exactly like a kitchen note: it does not repeat the mashed potato recipe, it simply tells the cook what to do with what is already in the pan. That thrift is part of the point.