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Potato Cakes
Take cold mashed potatoes or cold baked or boiled potatoes that have been mashed and seasoned; roll into balls, dusting the hands well with flour first. Flatten into cakes and sauté in butter, or place on a buttered tin with a small piece of butter on the top of each and bake in a hot oven until golden brown.
A leftovers recipe with no measurements, which is the point: the ratio is whatever mashed potato you have. Two details decide whether these hold together.
- Dry potato is the hingeCakes fall apart when the mash is wet or loose. Cold, stiff mash made from baked or well-drained boiled potatoes binds on its own; if yours is soupy from milk or cream, work in a spoonful or two of flour before shaping.
- "Hot oven"In cookbooks of this period a hot oven is generally reckoned somewhere around 400-450F. Give the cakes 15-20 minutes, until the undersides are set and browned.
- Buttered tinA rimmed baking sheet. Butter it generously or use parchment plus butter, since potato starch grips bare metal.
- SautéingButter alone browns fast at the heat these need. Half butter and half a neutral oil, or clarified butter, gives the same flavor without scorching. Three to four minutes a side in a hot pan, and leave them alone until a crust forms or they will tear.
- ThicknessFlatten to about half an inch. Thicker cakes stay pasty in the middle because the potato is already cooked and nothing more happens inside.
- SeasoningThe recipe assumes the mash was already seasoned. Cold potato tastes flatter than warm, so taste and add salt and pepper before shaping rather than after.
- YieldA pound of cold mash, roughly two cups, makes six to eight cakes, enough for three or four people as a side.
Potato cakes belong to the older, unsentimental tradition of the leftover dish, where the cook's skill lay in making yesterday's supper look deliberate. Short entries like this one served as a template rather than a formula: no quantities, two cooking methods, and the assumption that the reader already had a bowl of mashed potato in the cool pantry. The griddled potato cake has close relatives across northern Europe, from Irish potato farls to German Kartoffelpuffer, though some of those, Kartoffelpuffer among them, are built from raw grated potato; the American version is usually a second-day dish made from cooked mash.