Mustard Plaster provides a link to the pamphlet The $100 Prize Essay On The Cultivation Of The Potato, Prize offered by W.T. Wylie and awarded to D.A. Compton to which is appended How To Cook The Potato, Furnished by Prof. Blot (New York, 1870). Well worth a read if you are a potatoey person, which I sincerely hope you are.

Prof. Blot, by the way, is Pierre Blot (c.1818-1874), a man whose name I would have had to invent had he not already existed. According to culinary historian Jan Longone, “As far as I can tell, no other nineteenth-century cook in America was treated with a comparable level of media hyperbole”. Alas, after his death, an article written about him concluded that “he lived to see himself neglected and discarded by a capricious public”.

The Pierre Blot revival begins here!