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Mashed Potatoes
1 pint boiled potatoes. Speck pepper cup hot milk teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons butter Mash the hot potatoes with wire masher, or put through ricer. Add seasoning, quantity of milk used will vary with quantity of potatoes. Use just enough to moisten well, but potatoes should not seem watery. Place over fire again and heat till light and smooth. 2 cups mashed potatoes teaspoon white pepper
A plain turn-of-the-century mash, built on the assumption that the potatoes come straight from the boiling pot and never cool. The proportions in the original are stated loosely, so work by feel rather than by the numbers.
- Work hot, and only hotThe hinge of the recipe is that the potatoes are mashed while still steaming, and returned to the heat afterward. A cooled potato is harder to mash smooth and tends to work up dense and pasty; a hot one stays light.
- "Speck"A speck is a pinch — less than an eighth of a teaspoon. It is one of several small-measure terms (alongside "few grains" and "dash") found in American cookbooks of this era.
- Milk quantityThe original tells you outright that the amount varies, and that is honest advice. For 2 cups of mashed potato, start with about a third of a cup of hot milk and add more only until the mash holds a soft ridge from the spoon.
- Heat the milkCold milk cools the potato and tightens it. Warm the milk and butter together before they go in.
- Ricer over masherBoth options are given, but a ricer or food mill gives a noticeably smoother result with less working. Never use a food processor or stick blender: the blades rupture the starch cells and the mash turns to glue within seconds.
- White pepperSpecified so no dark flecks show. Black pepper looks different and tastes different too — more aromatic, where white is earthier and slightly fermented; use whichever you prefer.
- YieldTwo cups of mashed potato is roughly a pound of raw potatoes; the recipe gives no serving count, but it would do for two or three as a side dish.
Mashed potato entered American cookbooks as a matter of course rather than as a novelty, and by the period of this book the interest lay in technique: ricer versus masher, how much milk, whether to return the pan to the fire. That last step — reheating and beating the mash until it is "light and smooth" — is the one most often skipped now, and it is what separates a mash that mounds properly from one that slumps. The preference for white pepper over black may reflect a period concern with the appearance of pale foods that shows up elsewhere in white sauces, cream soups and boiled fish.