New potatoes should have their loose outer skin rubbed off with a cloth or stiff brush before being dressed or cooked.
Potato starch granules.
Potato starch granules swollen by liquor potassæ.
Mashed potatoes are prepared by crushing, with the back of a spoon, or with a rolling-pin, the hot ‘dressed’ tubers, placed in a bowl or dish, or on a pie-board. A little milk,
butter, and salt may be added to them at will, and they may be either at once ‘served up,’ or pressed into ‘forms,’ and first ‘browned off’ in the oven. Potatoes, if not soft and mealy, and well masticated, frequently escape the solvent action of the stomach, and pass off undigested, often to the serious derangement of the health. By mashing them this inconvenience is removed. The delicate, the dyspeptic, and the aged should take them in no other form.
Potatoes may be preserved so as to stand the longest voyages unchanged, by thoroughly desiccating them in an oven, or by steam heat. For this purpose the roots, either raw or three parts dressed, are generally first cut into dice of above 3⁄4 inch square, to facilitate the operation. Under a patent granted to Mr Downes Edwards, Aug., 1840, the boiled potatoes are mashed and granulated by forcing them through a perforated plate before drying them. The granulated product, beaten up with a little hot milk or hot water, forms an excellent extemporaneous dish of mashed potatoes.
The microscopic detection of potato starch is easy. Instead of being round or oval, and with a central hilum, the starch grains are pyriform, with an eccentric hilum placed at the smaller end, and with well-marked concentric rings. A weak solution of liquor potassæ (one drop of the Pharmacopœia preparation to ten of water) swells them out greatly after a time; while wheat starch is little affected by potash of this strength; if the strength is 1 to 3 (as in the figs.) the swelling takes place very rapidly.
POT POURRI. [Fr.] A mixture of odorous flowers, roots, gums, &c., varied according to the taste of the operator, either mixed together dry, or in the fresh state preserved with salt. “The usual way of making it is to collect roses, lavender, and other sweet-scented flowers, as they blow; to put them into a large jar mixed (stratified) with salt, until a sufficient quantity has been collected; then to add to these such other odorous substances as may be required to form an agreeable perfume.” Among the substances thus added are—ambergris, benzoin, calamus root, cascarilla, cassia, cassia buds, cinnamon, civet, cloves, musk, musk seed, orange berries and flowers, orris root, pimento, storax, vanilla, yellow sandal wood, &c.