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Cake (Cups Five Roses flour teaspoon)
2 cups Five Roses flour 1 teaspoon salt 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 cup finely mashed potatoes Milk or water.
Mix the flour with the salt and baking powder. Then add the finely mashedpotatoes and water or milk enough to make a soft dough. Turn the whole into a well-greased frying pan and cook slowly, turning occasionally, adding a little more lard to the pan each time until the cake is a nice brown on each side and well cooked through.
This should take about 30 minutes.
Spread with butter and eat while hot.
Very cheap and a nice change for supper. [108
A frying-pan bread rather than a sweet cake, built on leftover mashed potato. The whole thing turns on heat control: too hot a pan and the outside browns long before the centre is cooked.
- Heat and timing"Cook slowly" means low to medium-low on a modern burner, roughly the setting you would use for pancakes but a notch lower. Thirty minutes for a cake this thick is right; rushing it gives a scorched crust over raw dough.
- ThicknessThe original gives no pan size. In a 9- or 10-inch skillet the dough sits about an inch deep, which is what the half-hour timing assumes. A wider pan means a thinner cake and less time; check the centre with a skewer.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian all-purpose flour milled from hard spring wheat, somewhat stronger than most American all-purpose. Ordinary all-purpose works; bread flour will make it tougher, which is not what you want here.
- The potatoesThe recipe specifies only "finely mashed potatoes," and lists no butter, cream or extra seasoning, so plain mash is the likely intention. Leftover mash that has already been enriched will work but will brown faster and taste heavier, so cut the added fat in the pan.
- "Soft dough"Wetter than a biscuit dough, closer to a very thick scone dough that just holds its shape when patted out. Add the liquid a few tablespoons at a time; the moisture in the potato varies enormously.
- Lard in the panThe recipe directs a little more fat at each turn. Bacon fat, lard or a neutral oil all serve; a tablespoon at each flip is plenty.
- Turning itA cake this size and this soft is easiest flipped by sliding it onto a plate, inverting a second plate over it, and returning it to the pan. Doing it with a spatula alone tends to break it.
- YieldRoughly four to six wedges, enough for a light supper for three or four with butter and something salty alongside.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg and distributed in enormous numbers through the 1910s and 1920s, one of the great flour-brand cookbooks of the Canadian kitchen. Recipes like this one, closing with "very cheap and a nice change for supper," reflect the book's other purpose: much of its content was solicited from home cooks across the country, and the household economy of the contributors shows plainly. Potato breads and griddle cakes of this kind are old across the northern British Isles and their Canadian diaspora, from Irish potato farls to Scottish tattie scones, and they exist for the same reason everywhere -- cold mashed potato stretches expensive flour, adds moisture, and is generally said to keep the result soft for longer than plain dough would.