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Potato Pan Cakes
2 cups grated potato 2 eggs 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon Gold Medal flour Few grains of pepper The potato should be peeled and kept in cold water over night, drained and grated in the morning. Beat the eggs separately; mix all the ingredients, brown in thin cakes in butter. In winter serve with meat, in summer serve with Tomato or Brown Sauce.
A very plain potato pancake — essentially grated raw potato bound with egg and a spoonful of flour. The success of it turns almost entirely on how wet the potato is when it hits the pan.
- Drain the grated potato hardThe overnight soak in cold water keeps the peeled flesh from blackening before morning, but once grated the potato must be wrung out in a towel until it stops dripping. Wet shreds steam rather than brown and the cakes fall apart.
- "Beat the eggs separately"In cookbooks of this period this generally means beating the yolks and the whites in separate bowls, not beating the eggs one at a time. The recipe itself then says only to mix all the ingredients, and gives no direction to fold the whites in last.
- QuantityTwo cups of grated potato is somewhere in the region of three-quarters of a pound of peeled potatoes, roughly two medium ones. One tablespoon of flour is all the binding these get; add a second only if the mixture will not hold together on the spatula.
- Potato varietyStarchy baking potatoes give the crispest edge. Waxy new potatoes hold too much moisture and produce a dense, gummy cake.
- "Brown in thin cakes in butter"Butter alone scorches at the heat needed to crisp raw potato. Clarified butter, or butter cut with a neutral oil, over medium-high heat gives the same flavour without burnt solids. Spread each cake thin — no more than a quarter inch — so the interior cooks through before the outside darkens.
- DonenessRaw grated potato needs three to four minutes a side. Cut into one before serving the batch; underdone potato has a distinct chalky crunch.
- Yield and servingAbout eight to ten cakes, enough for three or four as a side. The original's seasonal note simply directs that they be served with meat in winter and with Tomato or Brown Sauce in summer.
Grated-potato cakes belong to a broad family found across northern Europe — the German Kartoffelpuffer, the Jewish latke, the Swiss rösti — and are generally thought to have arrived in American cookbooks through Central European immigration during the nineteenth century. Their appearance in a flour company's promotional cookbook is telling: the single tablespoon of flour is the thinnest possible justification for including the recipe at all in a book issued by millers to encourage domestic baking. The overnight soak, with peeled potatoes held in cold water, was a standard way to have prep done before breakfast, and also kept the potatoes from browning.