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POTATO CAKE (another way)
Peel some mealy baked potatoes, mash, and put them into a saucepan with salt, grated lemon-peel, and fresh butter, stirring the whole well. Add orange-flower water, the yolks of eight eggs, the whisked whites of four, and mix the whole with the potato puree. Pour into a buttered mould, and bake.
A Victorian potato pudding baked in a mould, closer to a soufflé-pudding than to anything called a cake today. The original gives no quantities at all, so the proportions have to be reasoned back from the eight yolks and four whites.
- Scale it from the eggsEight yolks and four whisked whites will carry roughly 2 lb of baked potato flesh (about 4 large russets), 4 oz butter and a teaspoon of salt. Much more potato than that and the mixture bakes dense and gluey rather than light.
- Mealy potatoes, baked not boiled"Mealy" means high-starch and floury: russets or King Edwards. Baking rather than boiling keeps water out of the flesh, which is the whole point here, so do not substitute boiled potatoes.
- Rice them while hotPush the hot flesh through a ricer or sieve. A food processor turns cooked potato into a rubbery paste within seconds because it ruptures the starch cells.
- Orange-flower waterStill sold as a distilled flavouring in Middle Eastern and baking aisles. It is potent; a teaspoon is enough for this quantity, and it is not interchangeable with orange extract or orange juice.
- Fold the whites lastThe yolks, butter, salt and zest go into the warm purée first; the whisked whites are folded in at the end, off the heat, once the mixture has cooled to lukewarm. Hot purée will deflate them.
- Oven temperatureThe original says only "bake" and gives no oven description, so the temperature is a modern guess: a moderate oven, around 350F/180C, suits a moulded egg pudding of this kind. In a buttered mould or souffle dish of about 2 quarts, expect somewhere around 45 minutes to an hour; it is done when set at the centre and lightly browned.
- Sweet or savouryNo sugar is specified, and with salt, lemon peel and orange-flower water it sits between the two. If you want it as a dessert, 2-3 oz caster sugar beaten with the yolks suits the flavourings; leave it out and it serves as a side dish with roast meat.
- ServingServes six to eight. It sinks as it cools, like any egg-raised pudding, so bring it to the table straight from the oven.
Potato puddings and "potato cakes" of this enriched, moulded type were a staple of nineteenth-century English cookery books, descended from the older tradition of sweet root puddings in which carrot, parsnip or potato stood in for the ground almonds and breadcrumbs of a richer household. The orange-flower water and grated lemon peel are of a piece with that tradition: both were standard eighteenth-century perfumes for baked and boiled puddings, and were still in use by the time Cassell's was compiled in the 1870s. The recipe turns on the lightening of a heavy purée with separated eggs, the same principle behind a soufflé, applied to the one vegetable every reader had to hand.