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Irish Potato Cake
To one cup of mashed potatoes add a well-beaten egg, half a cup of flour, and half a teaspoonful of salt. Mix well, turn out on well-floured board, adding a little more flour for kneading, and form into a cake half an inch thick. Cut this cake into wedge-shaped pieces and brown on a hot griddle to a light color. Then cover with an inverted pan and cook on the back of the stove until it is crustyabout twenty minutes. It is to be eaten hot with butter.
A one-cup recipe for leftover mashed potato, cooked entirely on the stovetop. The hinge is the second stage: the covered, low finish is what turns raw dough into something crusty rather than gummy.
- YieldOne cup of mashed potato makes a single cake perhaps 6-7 inches across at the half-inch thickness given; the recipe does not say how many wedges to cut, but four to six is a reasonable division. That is a small breakfast for two; scale up in whole batches rather than stretching one.
- The potato mattersUse mashed potato that was made plain or nearly so - butter and milk are fine, but a very wet or heavily creamed mash will demand so much extra flour that the cake turns tough. Cold mash straight from the refrigerator handles best.
- "Back of the stove"On a wood range this meant the cooler end of the cooktop, away from the firebox. On a modern hob it is the lowest setting your smallest burner will hold; the cake should sizzle faintly and no more.
- Griddle heat"Hot griddle" is not defined here; in practice a moderate heat on a heavy pan with a film of fat suits it, since the aim is only "a light color." Too high and the outside colors well before the interior sets, which is the work the twenty covered minutes are left to do.
- The inverted panCovering traps steam and cooks the wedges through without further browning - effectively a stovetop oven. A lid works as well as the pan; leave it slightly ajar for the last few minutes if the crust has gone soft.
- Flour by feelHalf a cup is a starting point, not a fixed amount. Add only enough on the board to stop sticking, and knead briefly; overworked potato dough goes elastic and heavy.
- DonenessThe wedges are ready when the cut edges look dry and set and a skewer comes out clean. Twenty minutes is right for a half-inch cake; thicker cakes need proportionally longer.
- Oven alternativeIf you would rather not tie up a burner, brown the wedges on the griddle and finish them covered in a 350F oven for the same twenty minutes.
Potato cakes of this kind - cold mash, flour, sometimes egg, cooked on a griddle - are old kitchen economy across Ireland and northern Britain, where the girdle or bakestone did the work of an oven in houses that had no oven at all. The wedge-shaped cuts are the traditional shape, the same quartering used for soda bread and bannocks, and the pieces are still sold as farls in the north of Ireland. Books like this one, published in the era when household writers were preaching thrift as a moral virtue, treat such dishes as a matter of course, because that is precisely their point: yesterday's mashed potato is not scraps but the main ingredient. The instruction to finish the cake on the back of the stove is a small dated detail worth noticing - it assumes a range with a permanent temperature gradient, always burning, always available.