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Irish Potato Biscuits
Boil and mash six or eight potatoes.
While warm, lay on a floured pastry-board and run the rolling-pin over and over them till they are free from lumps. Turn into a bowl, wet with a cup of sweet milk, add a teaspoon melted butter. When well mixed, work in½ cup Five Roses flour (salted) or just enough to make a soft dough. Return to the board, roll out quickly and lightly into a thin sheet, and cut into round cakes. Bake in a quick oven. Butter as soon as they are done, laying one on top of the other in a pile. Eat before they fall.
The excellence of potato biscuits depends very greatly upon the softness of the dough, light handling, and quick baking. properly made, they will be found extremely nice. A favorite Irish dish.
A potato flatbread rather than a raised biscuit — there is no leavening at all, so the lightness comes entirely from a slack dough and fast heat.
- The hingeAdd only as much flour as the potato will take and no more. Half a cup for six to eight potatoes is deliberately small; extra flour turns these from tender to leathery, and the dough should stay tacky enough to need a well-floured board.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400-450F. A hot stone or heavy sheet, well preheated, gives the fast set these need. They can equally be cooked on a dry griddle over medium-high heat, which is close to how Irish potato cakes were often handled.
- Sweet milkOrdinary fresh whole milk, so called to distinguish it from sour or buttermilk. Since there is no soda here, buttermilk brings nothing but acidity.
- Potato choiceFloury potatoes — russet or a similar baking type — mash dry and absorb less flour. Waxy potatoes hold water and will push you toward adding more flour than the recipe allows.
- The rolling-pin trickRolling warm mashed potato on the board is a real technique, not a quirk: it shears out lumps without the overworking that makes potato gluey. A ricer does the same job faster.
- Thin sheetAbout 1/4 inch, cut in 2 to 3 inch rounds. Bake 10–12 minutes, until spotted brown; there is nothing to make them rise, so judge by color.
- Eat before they fallSteam trapped in the stacked, buttered pile keeps them briefly puffed and soft. They go dense fairly quickly as they cool. Reheating on a dry pan helps a little, but these are genuinely a same-hour food.
- YieldVaries widely with potato size and how thin the sheet is rolled; expect a large batch from six to eight potatoes. Salt goes into the flour, so taste the mashed potato and season it as well if it is bland.
Potato cakes of this kind — leftover mash bound with a little flour and cooked fast on a griddle — are long associated with Irish and Ulster kitchens, where they still appear on a fried breakfast plate. The Five Roses book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company as an advertising cookbook, drawing on recipes contributed by Canadian households of the period. The note that the flour should be "salted" and the insistence on a named brand are the publisher's hand. Worth noting that the recipe treats potatoes as the body of the bread and wheat flour as the small addition, an economy that made sense wherever potatoes were cheaper than milled grain.