Home › The Principles of Cookery › Potato Rolls
Potato Rolls
Take four large boiled potatoes, dry and floury. Mash them till they are smooth, and while they are still hot, mix with them a little salt, a table-spoonful of clarified butter, and half a pint of hot milk. When the mixture is lukewarm, add half a tea-spoonful of yeast, and as much flour as will make a firm dough. Knead it well, cover with a cloth, and set it near the fire to rise. When it is sufficiently light, mould it into rolls, place these a little apart from each other on buttered tins, let them rise again for about ten minutes, and bake in a well-heated oven till they are firm, but they must not be too hard. Time to bake, about twenty minutes. Probable cost, 1d. each. Sufficient, allow one for each person.
A straightforward potato yeast roll, but the original assumes a brewer's barm and a kitchen with a hot hearth to prove in. Two numbers need adjusting: the yeast and the second rise.
- Do not add yeast to hot milkThe instruction to wait until the mixture is lukewarm is the hinge of the recipe. Half a pint of hot milk plus hot potato will be far hotter than yeast can survive; let the mash cool to blood heat before the yeast goes in.
- The yeast measure is ambiguousHalf a teaspoonful means liquid barm or a soft compressed yeast, neither of which converts cleanly. For a dough of this size, roughly 1 teaspoon of instant dried yeast (or about 1/4 oz fresh) is a reasonable modern starting point, but treat it as an estimate and judge by the dough.
- Half a pintCassell's is British, so half a pint is 10 fl oz, not 8. That plus four large potatoes will take roughly 1 lb 2 oz to 1 lb 6 oz (4 to 5 cups) of flour before the dough is firm.
- Clarified butterClarifying removed the water and milk solids that made ordinary butter of the period spoil quickly, which may be why it is specified here. Melted unsalted butter does the same job in the dough.
- Ten minutes is too shortA shaped roll of this richness needs 30 to 45 minutes at room temperature to prove properly. Ten minutes only made sense set close to an open fire, where the dough was much warmer than a modern worktop.
- A well-heated ovenThe book gives no temperature; something in the region of 400-425F suits. Twenty minutes at that heat gives a firm crust without the hardness the original warns against; they are done when the base sounds hollow.
- Potatoes"Dry and floury" rules out waxy varieties, which make a gluey mash and a heavy roll. Russet, King Edward or Maris Piper, baked or boiled and then steamed dry, is what is wanted.
- YieldFour large potatoes and this quantity of flour make about twelve rolls. The note of one per person reflects a table where bread was an accompaniment rather than the meal.
Potato in bread dough was a thrift measure that turned out to be a genuine improvement: the starch holds moisture, so a potato roll stays soft longer than a plain one, and cooks noticed this long before anyone could explain it. Potatoes also stretched expensive wheat flour, which is why potato breads spread through British and Irish kitchens through the nineteenth century and why Cassell's can quote the price at a penny a roll. The "half a tea-spoonful of yeast" belongs to the era just before packaged yeast became standard; the vagueness of the measure is a sign that the cook was expected to know her own yeast's strength. The direction to set the dough near the fire is the other period marker, a reminder that proving temperature depended on where in the kitchen you stood.