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Mashed Potatoes: The History of Everyone’s Favorite Thanksgiving Dish
Mashed potatoes have a long, drawn-out history — especially, ironically, in instant form. Guess the recipe for the Thanksgiving icon is harder than it looks.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
If one was forced by the twisting of the arm to choose one item to get rid of on their Thanksgiving plate on Thursday, some people might choose turkey (mostly the vegetarians), and some others might choose cranberries (which aren’t hip anymore), but I promise you nobody — and I mean nobody — would choose the mashed potatoes.
They are the glue of our thanksgiving meal, the most essential element, the only thing that must be served in some form. It is not a regulation Thanksgiving without mashed potatoes, the food that turned Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg into television’s most unlikely collaborators. (Gravy, though desired, is optional.)
Pile up the plate; we’re carbo-loading on the history of mashed potatoes, both the instant and not-so-instant kinds.
“Boil your potatoes, peel them, and put them into a saucepan, mash them well; to two pounds of potatoes put a pint of milk, a little salt, stir them well together, take care they don’t stick to the bottom, then take a quarter of a pound of butter, stir it in and serve it up.”
— A passage from The Art of Cookery, an 18th-century recipe book written by English author Hannah Glasse. This is widely believed to be the first-ever recipe for mashed potatoes, appearing as early as 1747. (Here’s a version from 1765.) As cited by the basic description offered above, Glasse was a major fan of simple language, and that likely helped the book become one of the most famous cookbooks of all time.
