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Rolls, Flour and Potato
Roll and dry one pound of potatoes, mix them with two ounces of sweet cream and half a pint of milk, and rub them through a wire sieve into a pound and a half of flour. Mix a gill of warm milk with a little yeast, and add this to the flour. Make into dough, let it rise before the fire, form into rolls, and bake quickly.
A potato roll of the standard Victorian type: cooked potato lightens the crumb and keeps it soft for a day longer than a plain flour roll. The original assumes you already know how a yeast dough behaves, so the quantities of yeast and liquid need judgement.
- "Roll and dry"The potatoes must in any case be cooked before they will go through a sieve; "roll" may be a slip for boil, or may refer to crushing the boiled potatoes with a rolling pin. Either way: boil them whole in their skins, peel, then return them to the dry pan over low heat for a minute to drive off steam. Wet potato will throw the flour ratio out.
- The sieveA wire sieve rubbed with a wooden spoon gives a lump-free purée; a ricer or food mill does the same job faster. Do not use a food processor, which turns potato gluey.
- A gillA quarter of an imperial pint, so 5 fl oz, about 140 ml. The half-pint of milk mixed into the potato is 10 fl oz.
- Yeast quantity"A little yeast" would have meant barm or fresh brewer's yeast, variable in strength and freshness. For this quantity of flour, roughly 15 g fresh yeast or 7 g (one sachet) instant dried is a workable modern equivalent. The warm milk should be blood temperature, not hot.
- Sweet creamSimply cream that has not soured — any pouring or single cream. Two ounces is about 4 tablespoons.
- Rising before the fireA hearth-side rise was warm and draughty in equal measure. A covered bowl at room temperature for an hour to ninety minutes, until doubled, does the same thing more evenly; shaped rolls need a further 30–40 minutes.
- "Bake quickly"Read as a hot oven: in modern terms roughly 425–450°F (220–230°C). Small rolls take 12–18 minutes at that heat and should sound hollow underneath.
- YieldA pound and a half of flour plus a pound of potato makes a large batch — around 20 to 24 dinner rolls. Halve it unless you are feeding a household.
Potato bread belongs to the long British habit of stretching wheat flour with something cheaper, a practice that intensified whenever grain prices rose and never entirely went away because the results were genuinely good. Cooked potato holds water in the crumb, so the rolls stay tender well past the point where a plain roll has gone dry. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled in the later nineteenth century for middle-class households, treats this as a plain bread: no eggs, no butter, no sugar beyond what the potato supplies. The instruction to let it rise "before the fire" is a reminder that timings in books of this period assume a cook standing by rather than a clock.