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Potato Bread
In making bread, a portion of mashed potato is sometimes added to the flour, and this addition improves the bread very much for many tastes; it also keeps it from getting dry quite so soon. At the same time it is not so nutritious as ordinary home-made bread. Boil the required quantity of potatoes in their skins, drain and dry them, then peel and weigh them. Pound them with the rolling-pin until they are quite free from lumps, and mix with them the flour, in the proportion of seven pounds of flour to two and a half pounds of potatoes. Add the yeast, and knead in the ordinary way, but make up the bread with milk instead of water. When the dough is well rise, bake the bread in a gentle oven. Bake it a little longer than for ordinary bread, and when it seems done enough, let it stand a little while, with the oven door open, before taking it out. Unless these precautions are taken, the crust will be hard and brittle, while the inside is still moist and doughy.
A workable formula rather than a full recipe: the flour-to-potato ratio is exact, but the yeast, milk and timings are left to the baker's judgement. Everything else follows ordinary bread practice.
- Scale the ratio downSeven pounds of flour to two and a half pounds of potatoes is about 36 percent potato by flour weight (roughly a quarter of the combined weight), and a large batch of dough. For one loaf, use 1 lb (about 450 g) flour to about 5.5 oz (160 g) cooked potato, weighed after peeling as directed.
- Hold back liquidPotato brings its own water into the dough, so start with about two-thirds of the milk you would normally use and add the rest only as needed. Potato doughs are stickier than plain wheat doughs and should stay slightly tacky rather than being corrected with extra flour.
- Yeast is unspecifiedThe book assumes you know your own barm or compressed yeast. For 1 lb of flour, 1 teaspoon instant dried yeast or 7 g fresh is the modern equivalent; potato-enriched doughs ferment briskly because the starch is already gelatinised.
- Rice the potatoes warmThe instruction to pound until "quite free from lumps" is the hinge of the recipe. A ricer or fine masher used while the potatoes are still warm gives a smooth result; cold potato turns gluey and lumps will show as dense wet spots in the crumb.
- Dry-fleshed potatoesBoiling in the skins and then drying them off, as the recipe says, keeps the water content down. A floury variety (russet, Maris Piper, King Edward) gives a lighter loaf than a waxy salad potato.
- "A gentle oven"Read this as a moderate-to-low oven, somewhere around 325-350F/160-180C, rather than the 425-450F a lean white loaf often gets. The higher sugar and moisture of a potato dough colours the crust early, which is exactly the false signal the last sentence warns about.
- Judge doneness by temperatureThe advice to bake longer and leave the loaf in the cooling oven exists because the crumb stays moist. A probe reading of 205-210F/96-99C in the centre settles the question; then cool on a rack for at least an hour before cutting.
- Yield and keepingThe full quantity is a large batch, on the order of five or six 2 lb loaves. The claim about keeping is sound: potato starch holds water and slows staling, so the loaf stays soft for three or four days.
Potato in bread dough was widely promoted and used across Britain and Ireland from the late eighteenth century onward, notably during grain shortages, when potatoes were cheap and wheat flour was not; stretching a barrel of flour with mashed potato was a way of getting more loaves out of the same money. Where the practice is framed as a matter of taste and keeping quality rather than thrift, it suggests it had outlived its economic reason and survived because people liked the soft, moist crumb. The remark that it is "not so nutritious as ordinary home-made bread" most likely reflects the Victorian habit of ranking foods by their protein, or "flesh-forming", content: potato dilutes the gluten of the flour, so by that accounting the loaf is poorer. Bakers today add potato, potato flour or potato water for precisely those grudgingly conceded reasons, and the technique survives in Irish potato bread, German Kartoffelbrot and American potato rolls.