Potato Buns
1 cake FLESCHMANN'S YEAST 1 tablespoonful sugar 1 cup milk, scalded and cooled 1 cup sugar 1/2 cup mashed potatoes 4 1/2 cups sifted flour 1/2 cup butter or lard 1 egg THESE Buns are very good and tasty and afford a zestful variation. The potato gives them a moist, keep-fresh quality.
Dissolve yeast and tablespoonful sugar in the lukewarm liquid, add potatoes and two cups sifted flour. Stir well, let rise about a half hour. Then add butter or lard, the sugar and egg creamed and about two and a half cups sifted flour, or enough to make dough that can be handled. Cover, let rise two hours, or until dough has doubled in bulk. Form into buns, place in well-greased pans and let rise about one and one-half hours. When light, bake twenty-five minutes. If lard is used instead of butter, add a half teaspoonful salt.
Place in pan, brush over with butter and sprinkle with cinnamon and pulverized sugar. Let rise again and bake thirty minutes. An excellent cinnamon cake can be made from this dough. Take a small quantity of it, add enough flour to stiffen and roll out about half-inch thick.
A sweet, enriched bun with mashed potato worked into the dough. The ingredients are sound; the instructions on this page have come apart in printing, and the order needs sorting out before anything else.
- Read the last paragraph firstThe page runs out of sequence. The bun method ends at “bake twenty-five minutes.” Everything after that is the cinnamon cake variation, and its two halves are printed backwards. The sentence explaining that a small quantity of the dough is stiffened with extra flour and rolled out half an inch thick comes last, but belongs first. In order: take a piece of the risen dough, work in enough flour to stiffen it, roll it out, pan it, brush with butter, sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar, let it rise again, and bake thirty minutes.
- Plain mashed potatoThe potato is a texture ingredient, not a flavor one. It wants a floury potato, boiled and mashed with nothing added at all, and cooled to lukewarm before it goes near the yeast. Leftover supper mash brings in fat, salt and liquid the recipe has not accounted for, and it is the usual reason a potato dough comes out heavy.
- The potato is doing real workThe claim about a “moist, keep-fresh quality” is one of the few in the book that holds up under inspection. Potato starch holds onto water more stubbornly than wheat starch does, so these buns stay soft a day or two longer than a plain bun of the same richness.
- Salt it either wayThe recipe adds half a teaspoon of salt only when lard replaces butter, because the butter of the day came salted. Modern butter is usually unsalted, so add the half teaspoon whichever fat is used. Without it the dough tastes flat underneath all that sugar.
- Pulverized sugarThis meant sugar ground finer than granulated, for sprinkling. Today’s confectioners’ sugar is cut with cornstarch and dissolves into a damp film on a hot bun. Superfine, sold in some places as caster sugar, is nearer to what the booklet intends and holds its grain.
- No oven is namedTwenty-five minutes for the buns, thirty for the cinnamon cake, and no temperature anywhere on the page. Sweet enriched doughs scorch, so keep to a moderate oven, around 350°F to 375°F, and take the buns out when they are golden and sound hollow underneath.
Mashed potato and potato water were standard equipment in American home baking long before a cake of yeast could be bought at the grocer. A cook kept a ferment alive in a jar on a shelf, and potato gave it something to eat between bakings; dozens of nineteenth-century household manuals carry a recipe for potato yeast, usually within a page of the bread. When manufactured yeast arrived and the jar stopped being necessary, the potato stayed, because by then every cook could see what it did to the crumb. This recipe is that leftover habit pressed into service on behalf of the thing that replaced it. The potato supplies the softness; the cake of yeast supplies the lift the potato used to be keeping alive.