A wonderful pie from white potatoes instead of sweet potatoes.

Pi Day is this coming Saturday.

A few days after it, on Tuesday, is St. Patrick’s Day.

This year’s Independence Day will be the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

So why not a pie this year celebrating all three of those? I found this pie in a Horsford Baking Powder cookbook that celebrated its product’s Centennial Award from the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876. That’s right: this pie was in a cookbook that took part in the centennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The book itself probably didn’t come out in 1876, though it may have—the exhibition started in May of that year, leaving lots of time for a company that published as many iterations as Rumford did to add that award to their products. But I’m guessing 1877, for reasons I go into more detail about in my 2024 lead-up to the sestercentennial.

It’s a fascinating pie and one that appears to have fallen out of favor in favor of the sweet potato pie. This is a much lighter pie than sweet potato, and it allows the spices to shine. But it still exhibits some of the flavor of potato, and, to my mind, to great effect. But I come from a long line of potato aficionados.

I considered saving this recipe for National Potato Day, one of the other handful of food days I enjoy. But that’s in August, after Independence Day, so, given that this is the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, I decided to put it here.

Here’s the full recipe as it appears in the Rumford Chemical Works cookbook:

Irish Potato Pie.—One pound mashed potato, rubbed through a cullender, one-half pound butter creamed with the sugar, six eggs, whites and yolks beaten separately, one lemon squeezed into the potato while hot, one teaspoonful nutmeg, one teaspoonful mace, two cups white sugar. Mix and bake same as Sweet Potato Pie.

The “Sweet Potato Pie” appears directly above:

Sweet Potato Pie.—One pound mealy sweet potatoes, one-half cup butter, three-quarters cup white sugar, one tablespoonful cinnamon, one teaspoonful nutmeg, four eggs, whites and yolks beaten separately, one lemon, juice and rind, and a glass of brandy. Parboil the potatoes and grate when cold. Cream the butter and sugar, add the yolk, the spice and lemon. Beat the potatoes in by degrees and until all is light, then the brandy, and stir in the whites. Use no top crust.

A couple of things stand out for this recipe. The first is that that sweet potato pie recipe wouldn’t be seen as out of the ordinary (other than being very good) today.

The other is that the mashed potato recipe uses 50% more eggs, twice as much butter, and more than twice as much sugar. Even assuming that the eggs are what we would call medium eggs, that recipe as written makes a lot of pie filling. The first time I made it, I was making it on the road and used a pre-made pie crust that was probably about 7-½ inches, not even an 8-inch pie, and I had nearly enough left over for another entire pie.

Even dropping it to a ⅚ recipe as I’ve done here it risks overflowing the dish. I always put it on a sheet. However, in this case it’s not that it’s too much filling but that it’s a high-rising filling that falls back when the pie cools, leaving just the right amount. I have a suspicion that they used ten- or even eleven-inch pie tins back then.

Finally, is this really an Irish pie? I’m guessing not. Recipes tended to be titled based on superficial characteristics back then (and to an extent still are). If it contained oatmeal, there’s a good chance it was going to be a Scottish recipe. If it produced round cookies with nuts in it that looked like sausage, it might be German, and so on. I have a 1933 Frigidaire cookbook that lists two kinds of potatoes: “Potatoes, Sweet”… and “Potatoes, Irish”. They used “Irish” to differentiate what we just call “potatoes” from sweet potatoes. That could well be what’s happening here. It isn’t the pie that’s Irish. It’s the potatoes.

From my Christmas post last year, the 1916 Table and Kitchen has a very similar pie called, simply, “Potato Pie”:

Potato Pie.—Boil and mash fine four potatoes, to which add three eggs and yolks of three others, with one cup butter; flavoring and sweetening to taste. Beat with sugar whites of the eggs left out and spread over pie, returning to oven until browned.

This differs mainly in that it doesn’t bother adding the yolks and white separately, but does reserve a few of the whites to use as a meringue topping.

It also doesn’t bother calling it “Irish” pie.

And back in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century, Thomas Jefferson had a very similar dessert. I can’t find the original, but in her 1938 Thomas Jefferson’s Cook Book Marie Kimball translated it into then-modern terms as:

GATEAU DE POMME DE TERRE

Peel 6 large potatoes, cut them up and place in a saucepan. Cover with water and boil until tender. Drain and press them through a colander. Add the well-beaten yolks of 3 eggs, and sugar to taste. Beat the whites of the eggs to a stiff froth and fold them into the first mixture. Butter a mould well and dust with bread crumbs. Pour in the pudding and bake in a moderate oven until set, from one-half to three-quarters of an hour.

It has more potatoes and less eggs, likely making it more like a cake (“gateau”) than a pie, but it’s obviously the same idea. This potato pie recipe is not just a centennial recipe but also traces back to probably our most food-oriented founder—who was a primary author of the Declaration of Independence that announced our freedom two hundred and fifty years ago this year!