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Mashed Potatoes
Peel, wash and drain nicely six rather small, sound potatoes; cut them into quarters, place in a pan, cover with water and boil for thirty-five minutes; drain well and press them through a puree sieve into an enamelled pan. Season with a teaspoon salt, one saltspoon white pepper and one saltspoon grated nutmeg; add one tablespoon butter and a gill and a half hot milk. Mix well with the wooden spoon, while gently heating for five minutes. Turn into a hot vegetable dish, pass the blade of a table knife over the surface to give a delicate appearance and serve.
A French-style pomme puree in miniature, and the instructions are sound apart from the boiling time and a couple of vanished measures.
- The hinge: sieve, never beatPressing through a puree sieve — a ricer or food mill today — ruptures the cells cleanly. A food processor or stick blender will shear the starch and give you glue, no matter how good the potatoes were.
- A gill and a halfA gill is usually reckoned as a quarter pint (5 fl oz) in British books, though 4 fl oz — half a cup — is also used; so this is somewhere between 3/4 cup and a scant cup of hot milk for six small potatoes. Add it in stages; the amount a potato will absorb depends on how floury it is.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So a quarter teaspoon each of white pepper and grated nutmeg, against a full teaspoon of salt.
- Thirty-five minutes is too longQuartered small potatoes are tender in 15 to 20 minutes at a gentle boil. Held longer they waterlog, and the puree turns thin and needs more butter than it should to recover.
- Why enamelledBare iron or unlined copper discolours potato to a dull grey. Any modern non-reactive pan — stainless, enamel, nonstick — does the job the original was insisting on.
- Choice of potato"Sound" meant unblemished and not sprouting. For texture use a floury variety, russet or Maris Piper; waxy potatoes resist the sieve and go gummy.
- The five minutes of heatingThis dries off surplus water and lets the butter emulsify. Stir over low heat with a wooden spoon until the puree is steaming and no longer watery, then stop.
- YieldSix small potatoes will serve two or three as a side dish, perhaps four at a stretch.
Mashed potato appears in English printed cookery books well before the late eighteenth century, and the version here carries features often associated with the French kitchen: the puree sieve, the enamelled pan, the nutmeg, and the final smoothing of the surface with a knife blade for the sake of appearance. Nutmeg with potato and milk is a long-standing French seasoning habit, shared with bechamel and gratins, and it is often said to have faded from Anglo-American home cooking during the twentieth century, though this is an impression rather than a documented shift. The instruction to smooth the top is a reminder that appearance mattered: the recipe directs the cook to turn the potato into a hot vegetable dish, where the surface was the first thing anyone saw.