Home › Breads, Rolls, Muffins, Etc. › Potato Biscuits
Potato Biscuits
2 good sized potatoes. 3 C flour. 3 t baking powder. 1/2 t salt. 14 C butter or lard 1 egg 1 C milk (about) Boil and mash potatoes, having them free from lumps. Sift flour, salt and baking powder; add potatoes and rub in butter or lard. Mix to a light dough with the egg and milk, roll out a little thinner than ordinary biscuit and bake in a hot oven; serve as soon as done. 2 C flour sifted with 2 t baking powder 1 T sugar Little salt Lorna Vanston.
A church-cookbook shorthand recipe with the ingredient list printed after the method, and at least one measurement mangled in the original setting. The bones are sound; a couple of amounts have to be reasoned out.
- "14 C butter or lard"Almost certainly 1/4 cup, garbled in typesetting. Four tablespoons of fat to two cups of flour is in line with other biscuit recipes of the period; a quarter of that would give a dry, tough dough and 14 cups is obviously impossible.
- The missing potatoesNo quantity is given for the mashed potato. Comparable recipes of the era use about 1 cup of plain mashed potato to 2 cups of flour. Since the amount is genuinely absent from the original, treat 1 cup as a starting point and hold back some of the milk.
- Potato handlingThis is the hinge. The potatoes should be dry-mashed, unseasoned and free of lumps. Gluey or buttered leftover mash will make the dough slack and heavy, and lumps show up as dense spots after baking.
- Milk is elastic"1 C milk (about)" is honest: potato varies enormously in moisture. Add it in stages and stop when the dough just holds together. Potato doughs are stickier than plain biscuit dough and should be handled quickly and lightly.
- "A hot oven"In books of this period usually taken as roughly 425-450F. Potato biscuits brown fast on the bottom, so watch them; about 10 to 12 minutes at the thinner roll-out the recipe calls for.
- Why thinner than ordinary biscuitPotato makes a moist, close crumb that stays doughy in the centre if the biscuit is cut thick. About 1/2 inch is right, and the instruction to serve them as soon as done is not politeness: they turn heavy and slightly damp as they cool.
- YieldRoughly a dozen and a half 2-inch biscuits from this quantity.
Potato biscuits belong to the long tradition of stretching wheat flour with cooked potato, which predates baking powder entirely; potato was worked into breads and rolls because it holds moisture, keeps the crumb soft for an extra day, and cost less than flour. The recipe leaves the amount of potato unstated. The style of the entry, with abbreviations for cup, teaspoon and tablespoon and a contributor's name signed at the end, is often associated with American church and club cookbooks of roughly the early twentieth century, where recipes were collected from members as they wrote them and printed with little editing, garbled fractions and all.