Potato Cake
INGREDIENTS for good-sized cake.-1 lb. of potato flour, 6 oz. of butter, 1/4 lb. of castor sugar, 2 eggs, flavouring of essence of lemon. AVERAGE CosT, 10d.
Beat the butter to a cream, add the flour and next the other ingredients, then beat well together for 10 minutes. Pour into a buttered cake-tin, and bake for 15 to 20 minutes in a quick oven.
TIME.-15 to 20 minutes to bake, SEASONABLE at any time.
A Hind Loin.
Hand.
Pettitoes.
Spare Rib.
Kidneys.
L Belly-piece.
E Side of Pork.
Heart & Liver.
Tongue.
B Fore Loin Head.
Various Parts of Pork.
M E A Leg.
POTATO FRITTERS.
A short Victorian cake built on potato flour rather than wheat, so it behaves less like a sponge and more like a dense, close-grained shortbread. Note that the text has picked up stray words from a facing-page diagram of pork cuts; ignore them.
- Potato flourThis is potato starch, sold today in Asian and Eastern European groceries and in the baking aisle as potato starch flour. It is not the coarse dried potato "flour" made from whole cooked potato, which absorbs far more liquid and will not substitute.
- The proportions are thin on liquidOne pound of potato starch against 6 oz butter and 2 eggs gives a crumbly, barely cohesive mass, and other potato-flour cake recipes of the period often add milk or more eggs. The printed list may well be incomplete; treat it as a record rather than a working formula unless you are prepared to adjust.
- Castor sugarCaster or superfine sugar, finer than granulated but not powdered. Granulated will work but creams less smoothly into the butter.
- Essence of lemonVictorian lemon essence was generally oil of lemon dissolved in alcohol. A modern lemon extract can stand in; start with about half a teaspoon for this quantity, or use the grated zest of a lemon, and adjust, as strengths vary.
- A quick ovenUsually rendered as roughly 400-450F (200-230C). At that heat a large quantity of batter in one deep tin will colour before the centre sets, so the short 15 to 20 minutes implies a fairly shallow tin.
- Ten minutes of beatingThe figure assumes hand beating with a spoon and bowl; a stand mixer will do the same work in appreciably less time. Potato starch has no gluten to overdevelop, so the beating is only there to aerate.
- Cost and yieldThe 10d. average cost is a period price for the ingredients, not a clue to size. The recipe specifies only a 'good-sized cake' and gives no tin dimension or number of portions.
- Texture to expectPotato starch bakes short and slightly waxy, and the cake firms considerably as it cools. Let it cool in the tin before turning out, or it will break.
Potato flour cakes appear across late nineteenth-century English cookery as a way of using a cheap, keeping-quality starch that had come into general grocery trade with the growth of industrial potato processing. Their appeal was partly economy and partly texture: starch-based cakes were generally thought light and digestible, and are often said to have been recommended for invalids and children, much as arrowroot and sago puddings were. Editions of Beeton published after Isabella Beeton's death in 1865 were expanded repeatedly by the publishers, and short alphabetical entries of this kind may belong to that later encyclopaedic layer rather than her own 1861 text, though that cannot be settled here. Labels from an adjacent pork-cuts illustration have run into this entry, and it gives a fair picture of how densely these reference volumes were set.