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Potato Pancakes (No. 2)
12 large grated potatoes 1½ cups Five Roses flour ½ cup sweet milk 1 tablespoon salt.
This is an ingredient list rather than a method, which was normal in a milling-company cookbook aimed at cooks who already knew how pancakes were made. The proportions are sound; everything else has to be supplied.
- Scale it downTwelve large potatoes is somewhere in the region of 5 to 8 lb depending on size, and will make dozens of pancakes. A third of the recipe — 4 potatoes, ½ cup flour, scant 3 tablespoons milk, 1 teaspoon salt — feeds four.
- SaltA tablespoon of salt for four or five pounds of potato is somewhere under 1 percent by weight, seasoned but not excessive; with heavier potatoes it is less than that. If you cut the recipe, cut the salt in proportion rather than by eye.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, specified to distinguish it from the buttermilk or sour milk that many recipes of the period called for. Whole milk is the closest match.
- Drain the potatoes, then keep the starchGrated raw potato throws off a great deal of water. Squeeze it out in a towel, let the liquid stand a few minutes, pour off the water and scrape the white starch from the bottom back into the potato. This is the difference between a pancake that holds together and one that steams apart in the pan.
- Work fastGrated raw potato discolours quickly once exposed to air, going pinkish and then grey. Mix and fry promptly; the batter does not improve with standing.
- No egg, no leaveningThe flour and potato starch are the only binders here, so the mixture should be thick enough to hold its shape on a spoon. If it slumps, the potatoes were not drained enough — add flour a spoonful at a time rather than flooding it.
- FryingShallow-fry in about ¼ inch of lard, dripping or a neutral oil at 350–375F, pressing each spoonful flat. Three to four minutes a side gives a crisp edge and a cooked centre; a cooler pan gives greasy, pale cakes.
- Five Roses flourA hard Canadian spring-wheat all-purpose flour. Ordinary all-purpose flour substitutes directly, and here it is doing nothing but binding, so the protein content hardly matters.
The Five Roses Cook Book was produced by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and distributed in connection with purchases of its flour, and recipes calling for flour name the brand — it is advertising in the form of a household reference, and it was very widely owned in Canadian kitchens in the early twentieth century. Grated-potato pancakes reached Canada by several routes at once: from German and Central European settlers, for whom they are Kartoffelpuffer, and from Ashkenazi Jewish households, where latkes are eaten at Hanukkah. That this is version No. 2 indicates the compilers printed more than one potato pancake recipe. The flour-and-milk formula, with no egg at all, is the plainer and more economical treatment, and the quantity of potatoes suits a large household rather than a family of four.