Potato Cakes
Mash potatoes, just boiled. Add salt, pepper, butter, and cream, make into cakes, and fry brown on both sides.--Mrs. P. W.
A terse nineteenth-century formula that assumes the cook already knows the proportions. The whole dish turns on the potatoes being dry and still hot when mashed.
- QuantitiesNone are given. For four servings, about 2 lb of potatoes, 2 tablespoons butter, 2-3 tablespoons cream, and salt and pepper to taste will hold together without turning gluey.
- Choose a mealy potatoRussets or another floury variety mash dry and bind well. Waxy new potatoes hold water and give a slack mixture that will not form cakes.
- "Just boiled" is the hingeMash while the potatoes are steaming hot and let the surface moisture escape before adding butter and cream. Cold or wet mash will not take a shape, and overworked mash turns to paste.
- Cream, not milkThe period's cream was unhomogenized and skimmed from the top of the milk, so its richness varied; it was often nearer modern heavy cream than milk. Add it a spoonful at a time; the mixture should be stiff enough to hold a thumbprint.
- Chilling helpsThe original does not mention it, but half an hour in the refrigerator firms the cakes and keeps them from spreading in the pan. Form them about 3/4 inch thick.
- FryingButter alone scorches at the temperature needed for a good crust. Use butter with a little neutral oil, or clarified butter, over medium heat and leave the cakes undisturbed three or four minutes a side.
- If they fall apartA beaten egg or a spoonful of flour will bind a mixture that is too moist. Neither appears in the original, which relies on dry potatoes doing the work.
- ServingA breakfast or supper dish. The recipe as written calls for potatoes just boiled, though leftover mash will serve if it is dry enough.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, edited by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, is a compilation of contributions from some 250 housekeepers of Virginia and her sister states, which is why so many entries carry initials rather than names and why the instructions are so compressed: they were written by cooks for cooks who already knew the work. Recipes of this kind, using mashed potatoes with butter, cream and a hot skillet, belong to a long tradition of plain potato cookery found across British and American household books, related to the Irish potato cake and the English fried mash. The potato itself had moved from a garden curiosity to a Southern staple by the mid-nineteenth century, and a page like this one records less a dish than a habit.