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Potato Cakes
4 cups mashed potatoes 2 cups Five Roses flour 1 egg 1 tablespoon butter Pinch of salt.
Mix the potatoes and flour together with the egg, adding first the salt. Roll out-inch thick. Cut in shapes and bake on baking sheet. When cooked, split and butter. Serve hot.
A griddle-style potato bread from the era when leftover mashed potato was a daily fact of kitchen life. It is closer to Irish potato farl than to a muffin, despite its place in this chapter.
- The hinge: cold, dry potatoUse mashed potato that is cold and stiff, mashed without milk or cream if you can. Warm or wet potato will absorb far more flour and turn the cakes heavy and gluey.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat all-purpose flour. Modern all-purpose flour substitutes directly, and 2 cups is a starting point rather than a fixed amount -- add only enough to bring the dough together.
- ThicknessThe original thickness has not survived legibly. Roll to about 1/2 inch for a soft, splittable cake; 1/4 inch gives a crisper result that will not split well.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given. Bake on a lightly floured sheet at 425F for 15-20 minutes, until set and lightly browned underneath.
- Griddle alternativeA dry, moderately hot griddle or heavy pan, about 4-5 minutes a side, is an alternative to the baking sheet the recipe calls for, and browns more evenly. 'Cut in shapes' is not specified further in the original.
- No leaveningThere is no baking powder here, so do not expect rise. The egg and the starch in the potato are all that bind; handle the dough as little as possible.
- Yield4 cups of mashed potato makes a substantial batch -- roughly 12 to 16 cakes at 1/2 inch thick, enough for six to eight at breakfast.
- ServingSplit and buttered while hot is the whole point; they stale quickly. Reheat leftovers in a dry pan rather than a microwave.
Potato cakes of this kind travelled to Canada with Irish and Scottish settlers, where cold mashed potato bound with a little flour was fried on a girdle or bakestone and eaten with butter at breakfast or tea. Their appearance in a Canadian flour-mill cookbook of the early twentieth century is unsurprising: the Five Roses book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell flour, and a recipe calling for two cups of it served the miller's interests well enough, whatever the household's reasons for making it.