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Potato Cake, Sweet
Bake the required number of potatoes, and when they are done enough, burst them, and scoop out the contents with a spoon. Crush them until they are quite smooth, and weigh them. Mix with half a pound of potato, two ounces of powdered sugar, a little candied-peel cut into thin strips, and the well-beaten yolks of three eggs. When these ingredients are thoroughly blended, add the whites of the eggs beaten to a firm froth. Put the mixture into a buttered dish, sift a little sugar over the surface, and bake in a brisk oven. Serve the cake hot in the dish in which it was baked. Time to bake, about half an hour. Probable cost, 10d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A baked-potato pudding raised on beaten egg white, closer to a hot souffle than a cake. The hinge is that the potato must be dry and still warm when the whites go in.
- WeightsHalf a pound of cooked potato flesh is about 225 g. The recipe tells you to weigh the scooped flesh rather than count potatoes, so bake more than you think you need and weigh out the half pound. Two ounces of powdered sugar is about 55 g; "powdered" here means sugar pounded fine, near modern caster sugar, not modern icing sugar with its cornflour.
- A brisk ovenConventionally read as a hot oven, somewhere around 400F (200C), though the book gives no temperature. Half an hour at that heat sets the outside while the centre stays moist.
- Bake, do not boilThe potatoes are baked in their skins on purpose. Boiled potato carries far too much water and the batter will not hold the air from the whites.
- Get it truly smoothPress the hot flesh through a sieve or ricer rather than mashing it. Any lump survives baking, and a food processor will turn potato to glue.
- Fold while warmThe recipe does not say, but it is easier to beat the yolks, sugar and peel into the potato while it is still hot, let it cool to just warm, then fold in the whites in two or three additions: warm potato is loose enough to accept the foam.
- Candied peel"a little" is unquantified; an ounce (30 g) or so, cut in fine strips, is a reasonable reading. Good mixed peel or the pared candied rind of a lemon or orange both work.
- The dishButter a shallow baking dish of about a quart. The recipe sugars the surface only, and that sugar gives the crust. Serve straight from the dish, as directed.
- YieldFour to five as written, as a hot pudding rather than a slice of cake. Cream or a plain fruit sauce suits it.
Cassell's places this among the sweet uses of a vegetable that Victorian cookery treated as endlessly adaptable. Sweet potato puddings of this kind belong to an older English tradition of starchy baked puddings thickened with whatever the household had to hand, and the technique here, whipped whites folded into a sweetened puree, is the standard nineteenth-century route to lightness before chemical raising agents were universal in cake-making. The "probable cost, 10d." is the telling detail: Cassell's costed the great majority of its recipes, and tenpence for a pudding serving five marks this as a modest rather than a cheap dish, dressed up with a little candied peel.