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Bacon Rolls
Take one pound mashed potatoes, and mix therewith one ounce of melted butter and half a beaten egg. Add enough flour to make into a paste; flour the board and roll it out. Cut it into pieces about eight inches long and four inches broad. Spread thin slices of bacon over each piece, roll them up and bake. Probable cost, 3d. each piece.
A potato pastry rolled round bacon and baked — straightforward, but the original gives no oven temperature, no timing and no yield. The points below fill those gaps and flag the one variable that decides whether the paste works at all.
- Dry the potatoes firstThis is the hinge. Boiled potatoes that hold water will demand so much flour that the paste turns tough and grey. Steam or boil floury potatoes, drain well, return to the dry pan over low heat for a minute, then mash and cool before mixing.
- "Enough flour" in practiceFor 1 lb (450 g) of mashed potato expect roughly 4-6 oz (115-170 g) of plain flour, added a handful at a time until the dough just leaves the bowl. The original gives no quantity, and since potato moisture varies the judgement is yours to make.
- Half a beaten eggBeat one egg thoroughly, then use about half of it — around 25 g, or a tablespoon and a half. The remainder is useful brushed over the rolls before baking for colour.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given. Bake at 400F (200C) for 25-30 minutes: the bacon needs long enough to cook through inside the paste, and the outside should be firm and lightly browned.
- The baconBacon of the period was often dry-cured and distinctly salty, and would have been sliced thin. Modern wet-cured rashers release water as they bake and can steam the pastry; dry-cured streaky is the closer match. Do not add salt to the paste until you have tasted the bacon.
- Size and yieldPieces eight inches by four give large rolls. The recipe states no yield; depending how thin you roll, 1 lb of potato will make roughly four. Halving them to four by four gives eight of a more manageable size, in which case reduce the baking to about 20 minutes.
- ServingEat them hot, with a green vegetable or a sharp pickle. They reheat acceptably in a hot oven but go leathery in a microwave.
- The cost note"3d. each piece" is a pre-decimal costing for a whole finished roll, in the money of the book's own period, and is not anything you can convert usefully today.
Potato paste of this kind belongs to a broad family of British and Irish economy pastries in which cooked potato replaces some or all of the fat in a dough — the same thinking that produces potato scones, potato cakes and the pastry sometimes used for fish or meat pies in households where butter was counted carefully. The principle at work is a familiar one: a small quantity of a strongly flavoured, expensive ingredient, here bacon, is made to serve several people by wrapping it in something cheap and filling. The costing in pence at the end of the entry is characteristic of the book, which seems to have addressed a housekeeper expected to know what a dish ought to cost before she ordered the ingredients.