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Quick Potato Biscuits
Mix and sift together 1 cupful of flour, 1 cupful of corn-starch, 1 teaspoonful of salt, and 2 teaspoonfuls of baking-powder. Have ready 4 large hot boiled potatoes. Peel and put them through a potato press, adding 2 cupfuls of milk and 2 well-beaten eggs. Stir into this the dry mixture, adding as much more sifted flour as may be necessary to make a soft dough. Turn out on the board, roll, cut in small thin rounds, brush the tops with milk, and bake in a quick oven.
A wartime-economy biscuit that stretches flour with potato and cornstarch. The dough is wetter and stickier than a standard baking-powder biscuit, and the handling is what decides whether it rises.
- Work the potatoes hotThe recipe specifies hot boiled potatoes, and cold riced potato is stiff and much harder to blend smoothly. Press them straight from the pot into the milk and eggs and mix at once.
- "Quick oven"425-450F. Preheat fully; these need fast heat to set the crust before the moisture from the potato steams the interior flat.
- Corn-starchCornflour in British usage, and the same product today. It has no gluten, so it softens the crumb; the recipe compensates with extra flour added by feel at the end.
- How much extra flourThe quantity is deliberately open because potato varieties differ enormously in moisture. With this much liquid expect to add a good deal more flour, a few tablespoons at a time, stopping at a dough that is soft and tacky but leaves the bowl.
- Potato sizeFour large potatoes may run to two pounds or more; a pound and a half of potato gives roughly three cups riced. Mealy baking potatoes rice far better than waxy ones.
- Roll thin, and handle littleThe instruction to cut "small thin rounds" is not incidental. Thick potato biscuits stay damp in the middle; a third of an inch is about right, and overworking the wet dough makes them tough.
- Yield and timingA large batch of 2-inch rounds. Bake roughly 12-15 minutes, until the tops are set and lightly coloured; the milk wash browns them modestly rather than deeply.
- Eat the same dayThese are best fresh; they reheat acceptably in a hot oven.
Potato in bread is an old economy across northern Europe and the British Isles, valued because it stretches expensive flour, holds water and keeps the crumb soft longer than flour alone. This version is of the American quick-bread type: chemically leavened, quick to mix, and made without keeping a yeast sponge going. Cookbooks urging economy in flour were common in the first half of the twentieth century, when cooks were encouraged to substitute cornmeal, cornstarch, oats and potato wherever a batter would tolerate it. The generous use of eggs and two cups of milk here suggests that economy meant sparing the one costly ingredient rather than stinting on everything at once.