Potatoes Baked (but not as you know them) from Robert May 1660.

This week we return to something (sort of) savoury and the friendly English confines of Robert May’s extensive work, The Accomplisht Cook. The base for this entry's recipe is the humble potato – though a little less so in this, the seventeenth, century because it was relatively new to England. Sir Walter Raleigh may have first brought them to the island on his return from Virginia in 1586. It was not yet a staple in the middle of the next century when cookery books like The Accomplisht Cook were being written though they are not a complete rarity in the upper-class recipes those texts contain. 

“The Table” or index of May’s book lists the recipe as “Potatoes baked”. Again, it is not quite as humble or savoury as what that phrase would conjure up in a modern context. The full title of the instructions is “To bake Potatoes, Artichocks, in Dish, Pye, or Patty-pan, either in Paste, or little Pasties, according to these forms.” I will again give a modern adaption first, then some explanation of my choices and some of the historical and culinary context.

Potatoes Baked (a Potato Pie) Recipe

Ingredients

Pie

• 800g small to medium potatoes, scrubbed
• ½ tsp salt
• ¼ tsp pepper
• ¼ tsp nutmeg
• ¼ tsp cinnamon
• Approximately 400g pastry/dough - enough for a full 10-inch pie, top and bottom. See Notes.
• 50g butter, divided plus some for greasing.
• 60g dates, halved
• 50g beef marrow or suet, cut small or shredded
• 1/8 tsp mace
• 1 lemon, well scrubbed

Liquor or lear

• 50g of butter
• 1 tbsp white wine vinegar
• 2 tsp sugar

To Finish

• A small handful of sugar

Instructions

Bring a large pot of water to a boil.

Add potatoes and cook until tender but not falling apart: about 15 minutes for small potatoes, 20 minutes for medium.

Drain potatoes and place on a cutting board or similar, to cool slightly.

Turn on your oven at this point and preheat to 400°F / 205°C.

In the meantime, combine salt, pepper, nutmeg, and cinnamon in a small bowl. Set aside.

Grease a 10-inch pie pan with a little butter. Roll out enough pastry to line the bottom of the pan. Roll up onto a rolling pin and roll onto pan. Push pastry into pan.

Cut up 25g of your butter and scatter over the bottom of your pastry in the pan.

When potatoes have cooled enough, peel and place them on top of the butter.

Scatter over the salt and seasonings you have mixed in the bowl.

Place your date halves around the potatoes.

Scatter marrow pieces or suet equally over potatoes.

Do the same with the mace and 25g more of butter pieces.

On a clean cutting board, cut your lemon into round slices, discarding the pithy ends. Working over a small bowl – the one you mixed the spices in will work – pick out the seeds with the tip of your knife. Place the slices on top of the potatoes. Pour any juice from the bowl and cutting board over the filling as well.

Roll out the rest of your pastry. Roll onto your rolling pin and roll over the top of the filled pie. Crimp around the edge to seal.

Cut a small circle of pastry out of the centre of the top crust and replace, this will act as your vent or funnel.

If you have pastry remaining, you may decorate the top with whatever “fancies” you desire. See Notes.

Place your pie in the middle of the oven and bake for 400°F / 205°C for 15 minutes.

While the pie begins to bake, make your liquor. Melt the remaining 50 g of butter in a small pan, remove from heat and add your white wine vinegar and sugar. Set aside. 

Turn your oven down to 375°F / 175°C and bake your pie for a further 10 minutes.

Scatter your small handful of sugar over the top of the pie and return to the oven.

Cook for 5 minutes more or until the crust is golden.

Remove the circle of pastry you cut in the top of the crust earlier and pour in your butter/vinegar liquor and then replace circle.

Serve.

Notes on adaptation and in review

I had a pie pan's worth of frozen pastry leftover from my venison pasty attempt and extra puff pastry from my cream-tart last week. I used those for my pie shell and top respectively. Use whatever combination of ready-made pastry or period or modern recipes that will get you about 400g worth. My recipe from the pasty will work but it will make much more than needed.

Robert May’s instructions for these baked potatoes called for rosewater scattered with the sugar at end and “eringo-roots" to be added to the potatoes in the pie. I still did not have rosewater, unfortunately. Eringo known as eryngo or sea holly today, is a plant used as an herbal remedy or tea; its roots were candied in period cooking and this is probably what May is referring to. I have yet to access it but I see there are seeds available, so maybe this summer. I also did not have verjuice, so I used a relatively small amount of vinegar and I also replaced the beef marrow in the recipe with beef suet, because I had the latter on hand.

The period recipe gives no quantities, so I again judged amounts visually, recording the weights and measures as I went.

“Blanch” in period culinary contexts refers most often to almonds, where they are boiled then skinned. So, when May says the potatoes “being tender boild, blanch them,” I took that to mean he was saying peel them at that stage.

May gives specific forms for this dish in the first (1660) edition of The Accomplisht Cook, as seen in the image above. He or his publishers provide different forms in a fold-out section of later editions. Below you can see the versions from the 1678 and 1685 editions, which I had a chance to photograph.

I carved one of these into my pie top but it got lost in the baking, so he probably added the forms with pastry, called by other authors “fancies.” It probably also identified what was in the pie for the diner.

I sprinkled the sugar 5 minutes before the end of baking. May does not say to do this explicitly but does in similar dishes, as do other authors.

As you can guess, this dish is a lot of starch – potatoes in pastry - and an interesting mix of sweet, savoury and sour. Interesting in a good way but a ways off of the normal use of potatoes, in Western cuisine at least. The dates and a little sugar provide hits of sweet, while the lemon and vinegar counter-balance that with some sour. Potatoes cooked in suet is a nice savoury background. I could probably have added more but with the amount of butter added, and in the pastry, I was worried about the dish overall getting too greasy. As it was, the potatoes seemed to soak up a lot and still had a good texture. May does not say to cut up the potatoes and I did not. Other writers like William Rabisha in The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected (1661) and Thomas Cooper in The Art of Cookery Refin'd and Augmented (1654) slice the main ingredient after boiling in their recipes for potato pies. This may have been a bit easier to eat and the flavours may have penetrated better throughout. Overall, if you can take something like chip butty (a sandwich of fries and condiments), this starch on starch with layers of different flavours is excellent comfort food.

Next week, the plan is to try to make some period sausages.