For anyone interested in 18-th century cooking I'd highly recommend youtbue channel Jas. Townsend and Son: https://www.youtube.com/user/jastownsendandson/videos

They have amazing videos about that era cooking.

how surprisingly! Youtube seems to have channels for everything theses days

Is it a weird thing to use potatoes in sweet dishes? My mom/grandma/aunts always made needhams[1] with the bulk of the filling being mashed potatoes. Boiled potatoes without anything added to them are about as close to tasteless as you can get.

[1] http://www.npr.org/2012/08/26/159998395/maines-needhams-a-sw...

The recipe we've used for Scottish macaroons involves roughly an entire bag of icing sugar, about the same amount of coconut, and one small boiled potato :)

Depends on the potato. Try Norwegian mandel potet. Delicious. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almond_potato).

> Boiled potatoes without anything added to them are about as close to tasteless as you can get.

Hm, not my experience, but there are many types of potatoes, and usual supermarkets often stock only 2-3 that are cheaply available.

it's a rather common ingredient in sweet doughs, but I had never heard of it being used as a filling, interesting!

I'd just go for Taro at that point.

Given the other ingredients in those proportions, you could substitute an old combat boot for the potato and it would taste just fine.

    ‘It’s a lot better than I thought it would be.’ 

Oh?

    ... the boiled pudding calls for two pounds of potatoes 
    and one pound of butter...

Oh.

We probabbly shouldn't be surprised. I have a hard time finding a reference but I do remember very vividly the core recipe for a "sinfully delicious" Michelin 3-star restaurant's mashed potatoes.

Per portion, a pound of potatoes, half a pound of butter + seasoning. Of course there are cooking techniques to consider, but the fractions for ingredients are still the same.

Robuchon's mashed potatoes?

Could be. Name is certainly familiar, and after having had a night's sleep I believe I learned about the recipe from one of Bourdain's episodes.