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Potato Tea Cakes
Boil, skin and press through a sieve 4 large mealy potatoes. Add 2 well-beaten eggs and 1 teaspoonful of salt then stir in 1 pint of milk.
Sift together 1 cupful of flour, 1 cupful of cornstarch and 2 teaspoonfuls of baking-powder. Add to the potato mixture then stir in as much additional flour as may be necessary to mix to a soft dough. Roll out on a board, cut into round cakes and bake in a quick oven.
A potato-extended quick bread from the economy shelf, closer to a soft scone than a cake. The dough is slack and sticky, and how you handle it decides everything.
- Quick oven"quick" is usually reckoned somewhere around 400-450F. These cakes rely on a fast rise from the baking powder and a hot oven to set the crust before the potato-heavy crumb slumps; expect roughly 12-18 minutes for cakes about half an inch thick.
- Mealy potatoesRussets or another high-starch baking potato. Waxy varieties give a gummy, wet dough that will absorb far more flour than the recipe intends. Boil whole in their skins, peel while hot, and sieve or rice them so no lumps remain.
- Cool the potato firstLet the sieved potato drop to lukewarm before the eggs go in, or you will scramble them. The original assumes you know this.
- CornstarchThe cupful of cornstarch softens the crumb, standing in for part of the wheat flour. It is not interchangeable with cornmeal, which is what "corn flour" meant in some period books.
- A pint of milk is a lotWith 4 large potatoes and only 2 cups of sifted dry ingredients, a full pint of milk gives a batter, not a dough. Add it gradually and stop when the mass will just hold together; the "additional flour as may be necessary" is doing real work here, and may run to another cup or two.
- HandlingFlour the board and your hands generously and pat rather than roll. Overworking develops gluten and toughens a dough that is already heavy with starch.
- Yield and servingRoughly 16-20 cakes cut at 2 1/2 inches. Best split and buttered within an hour of baking; potato breads stale fast but reheat well on a griddle.
Potato breads belong to the long tradition of stretching wheat flour with something cheaper, and they turn up throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Ireland, Scotland and across the American Midwest, where potatoes were plentiful and flour was bought. Cooked potato holds moisture and gives a tender crumb, so the trade was not purely one of thrift, though thrift is why this version sits in a low-cost collection: no butter, no shortening, and cornstarch standing in for part of the flour. The griddle-cooked cousin, potato scone or fadge, is generally traced to Irish and Scottish kitchens; here the cakes are baked in a quick oven instead of on a hot plate. Recipes like this one crowded the printed page again during the wheat conservation drives of the First World War, when potato was official policy as much as household economy.