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Mashed Potatoes, Maria
Boil six medium, sound peeled potatoes in two quarts water with a teaspoon salt for thirty-five minutes. Drain on sieve then press through potato masher into a bowl. Cut three skinned country sausages in small pieces, place in small saucepan with a tablespoon good lard and briskly fry for five minutes, stirring meanwhile. Add potatoes, with a gill hot milk, half teaspoon salt, three saltspoons pepper and saltspoon grated nutmeg, sharply mix on fire for five minutes, dress potatoes on a vegetable dish and serve.
A one-pan supper dish of sausage folded into mashed potato. The only real conversions needed are the old small measures and the sausage itself.
- A gill4 fl oz, or half a cup, of hot milk in American measure (British books reckon a gill at 5 fl oz). Warm it before it goes in so it does not chill the mash.
- SaltspoonA quarter teaspoon. So three saltspoons of pepper is about 3/4 teaspoon — assertive but correct for this dish — and the nutmeg is 1/4 teaspoon, freshly grated.
- "Country sausages"Fresh, coarse-ground pork sausage in a natural casing, not a cured or smoked link. "Skinned" means slit and strip the casing; three links might be anywhere from 6 to 9 oz of meat depending on size. Bulk breakfast sausage is a reasonable substitute.
- Boiling timeThirty-five minutes is generous for peeled potatoes cut whole; test with a knife from about 20 minutes and drain the moment they yield. Waterlogged potato is the usual failure here. A dry, floury variety (russet, Maris Piper) mashes best.
- Dry the potatoesAfter draining, return them to the hot dry pan for a minute to drive off steam before mashing. The recipe's draining on a sieve before pressing may serve much the same end.
- The lardA tablespoon of lard starts the sausage rendering; the sausage's own fat carries the dish. Any neutral fat or butter substitutes, though lard gives the flavour the recipe expects.
- Five minutes "on fire"Keep the heat low and stir only enough to combine. Beating mashed potato hard over heat develops starch and turns it into paste — fold the sausage and its fat through and stop.
- YieldSix potatoes and 8 oz of sausage serve four as a side or three as a light main course.
The recipe belongs to a large family of European dishes that stretch mashed potato with vegetables, fruit or whatever cured or fresh pork the household had, sometimes served alongside rather than mixed in: Irish champ and colcannon, Dutch stamppot, German Himmel und Erde, in which the potato is paired with apple and the pork element is a black pudding served on the side. Cookbooks of the early twentieth century sometimes gave such dishes a woman's name he it a shorthis one included — though how settled a convention that was is hard to say. The measures here place it firmly in its era: the gill and the saltspoon were standard kitchen units in English and American books until graduated cups and spoons displaced them, and the call for "good lard" reflects a time when lard quality varied by supplier and was worth specifying. The generous nutmeg is also period-typical, since nutmeg with potatoes and pork was a common continental pairing that has largely fallen out of Anglo-American practice.