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Potato Cakes
Shape cold mashed potato in small cakes, and roll in flour. Butter hot omelet pan, put in cakes, brown one side, turn and brown other side, adding butter as needed to prevent burning; or pack potato in small buttered pan as soon as it comes from table, and set aside until ready for use. from pan, cut in pieces, roll in flour, and cook same as Potato Cakes.
A leftovers recipe of the plainest kind, and it works exactly as written provided the potato is cold and firm. Two details in Farmer's text repay attention: the pan and the state of the mash.
- The text is garbledThe second method is missing a word: the sentence beginning "from pan, cut in pieces" should read "Turn from pan, cut in pieces." The idea is that you press the mash into a buttered pan while still warm, chill it solid, then turn out the slab and cut squares or fingers.
- Cold means coldWarm mashed potato will not hold a cake and will not take flour. Refrigerate at least a few hours, ideally overnight. A stiff, dry mash cakes far better than a loose buttery one.
- "Omelet pan"In 1896 this generally means a small, heavy frying pan, often one kept for omelets. A cast-iron or heavy nonstick pan of 8–10 inches does the same job.
- Heat and patienceMedium heat, and leave the cakes alone for four or five minutes a side. Moving them early tears the crust off and the cake collapses. Add butter at the edge of the pan, not on top of the cakes.
- Flour, not batterA light dredge only — shake off the excess. A thick flour coat goes pasty rather than crisp. Some cooks bind the mash with a beaten egg yolk if it is very soft, though Farmer does not.
- YieldFarmer gives no quantities. As a rough guide, about two cups of mashed potato will make six cakes some three inches across, enough for three at breakfast.
- SeasoningLeftover mash from the table is usually already salted; taste before shaping. A grating of pepper or a spoonful of grated onion is period-appropriate and improves them.
Potato cakes appear in the *Boston Cooking-School Cook Book* not as a dish in their own right but as part of Fannie Farmer's steady attention to what happens to food after dinner. The 1896 book gives real space to such second-day dishes — réchauffés, croquettes, hashes — and in the domestic-science movement Farmer came out of, avoiding waste was a moral as much as an economic matter. The instruction to pack the potato into a buttered pan "as soon as it comes from table" is the telling one: it treats the leftover as a planned ingredient rather than a remnant, and it produces a neat sliceable slab instead of shaped-by-hand cakes. Versions of the same idea run through British and Irish cookery as well.