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Potatoes, Snow
Boil twelve new, medium potatoes with jackets on in two quarts water with a teaspoon salt for thirty minutes. Drain, peel, season with a half teaspoon salt and three saltspoons white pepper, then rub them through a sieve into a serving dish and serve. (Carefully avoid touching the potatoes after dropping from the sieve.)
A dish that lives or dies on one instruction, which the original puts in parentheses at the very end.
- The hinge: never touch the riced potatoThe whole point is that the strands fall loosely and hold air, which is what makes them look like snow. Pressing, smoothing or spooning them into shape collapses the pile into paste. Set the sieve or ricer directly over the serving dish and let it heap where it lands.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three of them is about 3/4 teaspoon of white pepper for twelve potatoes. That is assertive by modern taste; half that amount is closer to what most cooks want, and white pepper is specified so no black flecks spoil the whiteness.
- Choose floury, not new"New" in period usage usually meant freshly dug, though such potatoes are also typically waxy, and waxy potatoes turn gluey when forced through a sieve. For a dry, separate snow, use a floury baking potato such as russet, or a dry-fleshed yellow.
- Thirty minutes is a guideMedium potatoes in their skins may take 25 to 45 minutes depending on size and variety. They are ready when a skewer meets no resistance at the centre. Underdone potato will not pass through a sieve, and overdone potato waterlogs.
- Dry them before ricingAfter draining, return the potatoes to the empty hot pan for a minute, or leave them uncovered while you peel, so surface moisture steams off. Damp potato ropes rather than falls.
- Peel while hotThe skins slip off easily straight from the water and the flesh must still be hot when it goes through the sieve. Hold each one in a cloth, or spear it with a fork, and work quickly.
- EquipmentA potato ricer does this faster and more neatly than a sieve; a food mill with the coarse plate also works. A food processor never does, at any speed.
- Yield and servingTwelve medium potatoes serve six to eight as a side dish. There is no butter, cream or milk in it, so it cools fast and firms up as it sits: rice it at the last moment and carry it straight to the table.
Snow potatoes -- potato forced through a sieve so that it falls in loose strands -- belongs to a family of dishes named for what they looked like rather than what was in them, and the name echoes the French pommes de terre en neige. The insistence on white pepper and on not touching the potato afterwards is about appearance: the dish has no flavouring to speak of, so its entire appeal is texture and colour, and both are destroyed by a spoon. The recipe specifies only a sieve.