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Potato Biscuit
1 cake FLEISCHMANN'S YEAST 1 pint milk 1 quart flour 1 egg 1 tablespoonful granulated sugar 1 quart mashed potatoes 1/2 teaspoonful salt Butter (size of an egg) Potato biscuits that are light and tender, with a delicious melt-in-your-mouth goodness, are assured you if you follow these directions. These ingredients will make 45 Biscuits.
Bake and mash six large potatoes, enough to make one quart, place in bowl, add salt, sugar and butter. Take a cupful of the milk, heat till lukewarm, dissolve yeast cake in it, and add enough flour to make a sponge--about one cup. Set sponge aside in warm place, free from draught, to rise. Bring balance of the milk to boiling point and then add it to bowl containing the potatoes, salt, sugar and butter.
When sponge has risen and dropped back, add it to bowl containing the other materials, also add the egg well beaten, remainder of flour and mix all together thoroughly.
Let rise in a warm place. Butter a baking sheet and drop the mixture from a tablespoon, as the dough should not be handled. Let rise again and bake from fifteen to twenty minutes.
A quart of mashed potato against a quart of flour, dropped from a spoon rather than rolled, yielding forty-five. The method has one gap in it that will cost a whole batch.
- The boiling milk has to coolThe recipe brings the remaining milk to the boil, pours it over the potatoes, and then adds the risen sponge to the same bowl. It never says to let the mixture cool first. It must. Lukewarm, under about 110°F, or the heat kills the yeast and nothing rises.
- Quart and pint, in American measureA quart of flour is four cups, roughly 500g. A quart of mashed potato is four cups, which is what six large baking potatoes give. A pint of milk is two cups. Butter the size of an egg is about four tablespoons.
- Bake the potatoes, do not boil themThe instruction says bake and mash, and the difference is not incidental. Boiled potatoes carry water this dough cannot absorb, and the batter goes slack enough to spread into one sheet.
- Not a biscuit in the Southern senseThese are soft yeast rolls, not baking powder biscuits. The dough is deliberately too wet to handle, which is why it goes from the spoon straight onto a buttered sheet, and why it spreads. Leave room between them.
- Forty-five is a great manyThe quantities are sized for a household feeding a crowd. A quarter batch — one cup of mashed potato, one cup of flour, half a cup of milk, the whole egg and a spoonful of extra flour to take it up — makes about a dozen.
- Oven heatNone is given. Fifteen to twenty minutes puts these at around 400°F. They are done when the tops are set and barely coloured; the potato keeps them pale, so colour is a poor guide.
Potato in a yeast dough is older than the yeast cake raising it. Before compressed yeast could be bought, a household kept its own leaven alive, and a potato ferment — mashed potato, water, a little sugar and flour, caught and fed and carried from bake to bake — was one of the standard ways to do it, because the starch fed the wild yeast between bakings. Fleischmann’s product made all of that labour unnecessary, and yet the potato stayed in the book. It stayed because by then it was earning its place a different way. Cooked potato starch holds water that flour alone will not, which is why these are tender coming out of the oven and still tender the next day, and why potato still turns up in commercial bread formulas. The booklet promises a melt in the mouth goodness; the potato is what delivers it. A leftover from the old way of baking, kept on for a reason nobody at the time needed to write down.