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Potato Pudding
(Budino di patate) Potatoes, big and mealy, one and a half lb.
Sugar, five and a half ounces.
Butter, one and a half ounces.
Flour, a tablespoonful.
Milk, half a pint.
Six eggs.
A pinch of salt.
Paste of cinnamon or lemon peel.
Boil or steam the potatoes, skin and rub through a sieve. Place them back again on the a sieve. Place them back again on the fire with the butter, the flour and the milk, all poured little by little, stirring well with the ladle, then add the sugar, the salt and the cinnamon or lemon peel (just a taste) and mix everything together well . Remove from the fire and, when the mixture is lukewarm or cold add the eggs, first the yolks , then the whites beaten.
Bake like all other puddings and serve hot. 204
A potato-and-egg pudding of the Artusi school: essentially a sweet, souffléed mash. The translation is rough in places and the baking instruction is left entirely to the cook, so a few decisions have to be made for it.
- The measurements in modern terms1½ lb potatoes (about 3 medium russets), 5½ oz sugar (a generous ¾ cup), 1½ oz butter (3 tablespoons), half a pint of milk (1 cup in US measure, though an English pint of the period would give 10 fl oz). Six eggs into that quantity of potato is what makes it rise.
- "Paste of cinnamon or lemon peel"Most likely a fumbled rendering of the Italian odore, a scent or flavouring. Read it as a pinch of ground cinnamon or the finely grated zest of a lemon, not a paste. The original's "just a taste" is the operative phrase; the flavour should be background.
- Sieve the potatoes hotPush them through a sieve or ricer the moment they are peeled. Cooled potato turns gluey under pressure, and a food processor will do the same thing at any temperature. Mealy potatoes, as specified, matter here: waxy ones give a heavy, pasty pudding.
- Why the mixture must cool before the eggsThis is the hinge. Yolks stirred into a hot potato base will scramble into visible threads. Let it come down to lukewarm at most, beat in the yolks, then fold in the whipped whites in two or three additions, keeping the mixture light.
- Oven and dishThe recipe leaves the baking entirely to the cook. A workable modern approach is a buttered mould dusted with fine breadcrumbs, set in a water bath in a moderate oven (around 350°F), roughly 45 to 55 minutes for a 2-quart dish, until set at the centre and lightly browned.
- Serve it straight from the ovenThe instruction to serve hot is not decorative. Like any egg-leavened pudding it settles as it cools, and the texture goes from airy to dense fairly quickly.
- YieldServes about eight. A dusting of powdered sugar is a common finish, and a spoonful of jam or fruit compote on the plate suits it well.
This is one of Maria Gentile's 1919 English renderings of recipes drawn from the Italian domestic tradition codified by Pellegrino Artusi, whose La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene (1891) includes a budino di patate built on the same principle: sieved potato enriched with butter, milk, sugar and a large number of eggs, lifted by beaten whites. Sweet potato puddings were common across nineteenth-century European cookery. The awkward doubled line about the sieve appears to be a duplication somewhere between the original edition and the text as we have it, and "paste of cinnamon" is probably best read as a translator's stumble over the Italian habit of calling a flavouring simply a scent.