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Beef and Potato Cakes
Mix with a cup of cold roast beef 2 cups mashed potatoes seasoned as for the table. Add a beaten egg. Mix and shape into balls and flatten like cakes. Roll in bread crumbs. Fry a golden brown. Nice for breakfast or tea.
Note on Breading Fried Things The reason many fried things have a flat taste, though the mixture may be highly seasoned, is that the seasoning of the bread crumbs has been neglected. Try mixing the bread crumbs with salt, pepper, and, if desired, a drop or two of any desired seasoning, before moulding. For frying or covering the tops of entrees, use bread crumbs instead of cracker crumbs, as they have less of a flat taste.
A leftovers dish that depends almost entirely on how dry the potato is and how finely the beef is chopped. The original assumes both come from yesterday's dinner.
- Chop the beef fineCold roast beef cut in chunks will make the cakes fall apart in the pan. Chop or pulse it to a coarse mince, roughly the texture of the mashed potato, so the egg can bind everything.
- Dry mash onlyMashed potato "seasoned as for the table" would generally have meant salt, pepper, butter and a little milk or cream. A wet, loose mash will not hold a cake; if the mixture slumps on the board, chilling it before shaping helps.
- The breading note is the real pointSeason the crumbs, not just the mixture. Salt and pepper on the outer surface is what registers on the tongue; unseasoned crumbs read as bland no matter how well the interior is seasoned. This holds true today.
- Bread crumbs vs cracker crumbsThe preference for bread crumbs over cracker crumbs still stands, though modern dry panko browns faster and stays crisper than soft fresh crumbs. Fresh crumbs will need a slightly lower heat to avoid scorching.
- "Fry a golden brown"This points to shallow frying in butter, drippings or a mix, in a heavy skillet over moderate heat until browned on both sides. Deep frying does not appear to be intended.
- YieldThree cups of mixture gives roughly eight cakes of two to three inches, enough for three or four people at breakfast.
- Reheating cooked meatThe beef is already cooked, so the cakes only need to be heated through and browned. Overlong frying dries the meat and makes the interior mealy.
This is a thrift recipe. The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell flour, and was compiled from recipes contributed by Canadian users of the flour, which is why its instructions assume a cook who already knows what her own mashed potatoes taste like. Cakes of chopped cooked meat bound with potato appear across nineteenth-century English and North American cookery under many names -- rissoles, croquettes, hashed beef cakes -- all of them answers to the same question of what to do with the Sunday roast on Monday. The appended note on seasoning the crumbs is a small piece of genuine practical technique.