Potato Cake
Two cups of white sugar, one cup of hot mashed potatoes, one cup of chopped walnuts, half a cup of sweet milk, two cups of flour, four eggs well beaten, five teaspoonfuls of melted chocolate, one tablespoonful each of cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg, two teaspoonfuls of baking powder. Bake in layers and use marshmallow filling.
A chocolate-spice layer cake leavened partly by the moisture in hot mashed potato, from Walter Baker's promotional recipe booklets. It reads oddly to modern eyes chiefly because of what it leaves out.
- The missing butterAs printed there is no butter or other creamed fat; the only fat comes from four eggs, a cup of chopped walnuts and a few teaspoons of chocolate. Many potato cakes of the period do call for butter creamed with the sugar, and its absence here may be an omission in setting the type, though there is no way to be sure. Without added butter the result will be denser and drier than a modern layer cake.
- Hot mashed potatoPresumably plain boiled white potato, riced or mashed smooth, without the milk, butter, salt or pepper of table mash; the recipe says only "hot mashed potatoes." Going in hot helps it blend smoothly rather than setting into lumps. About one medium potato gives roughly the cup required.
- Melted chocolateChocolate in this era generally meant unsweetened baking chocolate, sold in cakes and grated or melted before use. Five teaspoons of melted chocolate is roughly an ounce by weight — a light hand, so this is a faintly chocolate spice cake rather than a chocolate cake.
- Sweet milkSimply unsoured whole milk, distinguished from the buttermilk or sour milk that partnered saleratus in older recipes. Ordinary whole milk is the direct substitute.
- The spicingThree level tablespoons of ground spice total is heavy by current standards. A teaspoon each of cinnamon and cloves and half a teaspoon of nutmeg gives a more familiar balance.
- Oven and tinsThe recipe gives no temperature or timing; "Bake in layers" is all it says. A modern moderate oven of about 350F suits the batter, which should fill two 9-inch or three 8-inch layer tins; start checking at 20 to 25 minutes.
- Marshmallow fillingPeriod marshmallow fillings were generally a boiled sugar syrup beaten into egg whites, sometimes with marshmallows melted in, spread between the layers while still warm and spreadable. It is easiest to assemble the cake on the day it is served.
- YieldTwelve to sixteen slices. The potato keeps the crumb moist for three or four days under a cover, longer than most cakes of this weight.
Potato cakes of this kind belong to a broad American family of cakes stretched with cooked starch — potato, rice, or leftover bread — that ran from the mid-nineteenth century well into the twentieth. The potato does real work: its gelatinized starch holds water, so the cake stays moist far longer than a plain butter cake, which is why the type survived long after the thrift that first suggested it had faded. The Dorchester, Massachusetts chocolate firm Walter Baker & Co. published collections of recipes gathered from cooking-school teachers and home cooks for decades, each one calling for its chocolate somewhere in the ingredient list, and here the chocolate is met with five teaspoons in a cake otherwise dominated by cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg. The marshmallow filling suggests a broad window running from the 1890s well into the 1920s, when commercially made marshmallows became cheap enough to melt into boiled icing rather than serve as a confection in their own right.