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Sweet Rolls
One quart of potatoes, boiled and mashed. Add one cup of sweet milk, two eggs beaten light, one scant cup of sugar, a teaspoon of salt, and flour enough to make a thin batter. Let rise.
When light, make into a stiff dough and let rise again, then make into light rolls.
Bathe the tops with milk, sprinkle with cinnamon and bake quickly. No shortening is needed, and they must be kept twenty-four hours before using. Then slice, butter thinly, and toast before a bed of glowing coals. These will be good as long as they last. - Mary M. Willard.
A potato-dough roll from the invalid section, meant to be baked, rested a full day, then sliced and toasted — closer to a rusk than a breakfast bun. One thing is missing from the text, and it is the thing that makes the dough work.
- The yeast is not listed"Let rise" twice with no leaven named means the original cook was expected to supply her own, most likely homemade potato yeast or a soaked yeast cake. Use about 2 1/4 teaspoons of instant or active dry yeast, added with the milk; without it the batter will simply sour.
- A quart of potatoesMost likely measured after boiling and mashing, which works out to roughly 2 pounds of raw potatoes for about 4 cups of mash; the wording does not make this certain. Mash them plain, with no butter, milk or seasoning beyond the salt called for later.
- Sweet milkOrdinary fresh whole milk, specified only to distinguish it from the soured or buttermilk that was equally common in the pantry.
- Thin batter, then stiff doughThis is a sponge method: the loose potato batter ferments first, then enough flour is worked in for a kneadable dough and it rises again. Expect to add flour in stages — potato mash varies enormously in moisture, so the quantity cannot be fixed.
- Bake quicklyThe recipe gives no oven term, but period "quick" heat is usually reckoned at roughly 400 to 425F. Small rolls of this size want about 15 to 20 minutes; the milk wash and cinnamon will darken fast, so watch the tops.
- No shortening, by designThe potato supplies moisture and softness, and with no fat in the dough the rolls dry out over the twenty-four-hour rest rather than staying soft. Do not add butter to the dough.
- The twenty-four hour waitThe recipe gives no reason, but the likely purpose is texture: a fresh roll tears when sliced thin, a day-old one cuts cleanly and toasts through. Keep them loosely covered at room temperature, not sealed airtight or refrigerated.
- Toasting before glowing coalsAn open fire toasts by radiant heat, which is what a broiler does. Butter thinly, then toast under a hot broiler or on a rack over a grill, turning once.
- YieldThe quantities make a large batch, roughly two to three dozen small rolls. Halving is straightforward if you only want a few slices.
Potato bread of this kind was standard household economy long before it was invalid food: mashed potato stretched expensive wheat flour, held moisture, and fed the yeast, which is why so many nineteenth-century recipes for "light rolls" begin with a pot of boiled potatoes. Its appearance in a chapter on invalid cookery reflects the period's dietary thinking about the sick, who were given bland, fat-free, thoroughly dried and twice-cooked starches on the theory that these taxed the stomach least — the same logic that produced medical zwieback, milk toast and the various patented dried breads of the era.