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Potato Cakes
Form cold mashed potatoes into cakes an inch thick. Roll them in flour, brush each over with milk, and bake in a hot oven five minutes or sauté in vegetable fat.
A two-line recipe that assumes you already have leftover mashed potato and a hot oven going. The details it leaves out are the ones that decide whether the cakes hold together.
- "A hot oven"Period usage for a hot oven generally falls somewhere around 400-450F, so treat this as the upper end of a domestic range. At that heat five minutes is only enough to set and colour a surface on cakes that are already cooked through; if your oven runs cooler, expect ten minutes or more and a paler crust.
- The potato has to be dry and coldThis is the hinge. Mash made with much milk or cream will slump in the pan. Use potato that has been refrigerated at least a few hours, and if it seems wet, dry it briefly over low heat before shaping.
- An inch thick is deliberateAn inch thick -- a thick cake stays creamy in the centre while the outside crisps. The recipe gives no diameter; keeping them narrow, around 2 to 2.5 inches across, helps the middle hold when you turn them.
- Flour, then milk, then nothing elseFlour, then milk -- taking the order as given, the flour gives the milk something to cling to, and milk sugars brown readily. A second coat of flour after the milk gives a sturdier crust if you are sautéing.
- "Vegetable fat"This could mean a hydrogenated shortening of the Crisco type or simply a vegetable oil; what it rules out is animal fat, which matters in a meatless book. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point does the job; the pan should be hot before the cakes go in, and they should not be moved until a crust forms.
- SeasoningThe recipe assumes the mashed potato was already salted. Cold potato tastes flat, so taste before shaping and add salt, pepper and perhaps grated onion or chopped parsley.
- YieldA pound of mashed potato, roughly two cups, gives four to six cakes. If served as a main course, allow two per person with a sauce or a bean dish alongside.
Meatless cookbooks proliferated in the English-speaking world during and just after the First World War, when wheat, fat and meat conservation was official policy and households were urged to observe meatless days. A recipe of this kind is a meat substitute in ambition rather than in nutrition: a potato cake supplies bulk and satisfaction at the centre of a plate where a chop would otherwise sit, and costs almost nothing. Potato cakes themselves are far older than the campaign, being a standard use for leftovers across Ireland, Britain and the American kitchen, where thrift with cold potato was simply routine.