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Potato Cake
Mrs. S. McMaster.
Crush cold boiled potatoes with butter and salt; mix in a small proportion of flour and a little yeast (the last may be omitted at pleasure), and with milk work the whole to the consistency of very firm dough; roll it out to the thickness of an inch and a half or two inches; cut it out the size of your frying pan, previously greased, and in it lay your cake after flouring it all over; bake covered with a plate, shake and shift it a little from time to time to prevent burning; when half done turn it, and cover with a plate again.
A stovetop griddle bread built on leftover boiled potatoes, written in the loose proportional style of the 1870s. The hinge is heat: this is baked in a covered frying pan over a low, steady flame, not fried, and a cake this thick will scorch outside before the centre sets if the pan is too hot.
- Working proportionsThe original gives none. A useful starting ratio is about 1 lb (450 g) cold boiled potatoes, crushed, to 1-1 1/2 cups flour, 2 tablespoons butter and a teaspoon of salt, with milk added a spoonful at a time. Dry, floury potatoes such as russets behave far better than waxy ones.
- "Bake" means the covered panThere is no oven here. The greased frying pan sits over low heat and the plate on top traps steam so the interior cooks through, in effect a lidded griddle. A heavy cast-iron pan over the lowest workable burner setting is the closest modern equivalent, roughly 20-30 minutes per side for a cake this thick.
- The thicknessAn inch and a half to two inches is very generous by modern habit and demands patient, gentle cooking. Rolling to about an inch gives a cake that cooks evenly in considerably less time without changing the character of the bread.
- The yeastA "little yeast" in this period would commonly have been liquid barm or brewer's yeast, though compressed yeast was also available by the 1870s. If you use it, substitute about 1/2 teaspoon instant dry yeast and allow the dough an hour of rising before it goes into the pan; without a rise it contributes little. Omitted, as the recipe permits, the cake is a plain unleavened potato bread.
- Flouring the cakeDusting the surface before it meets the pan keeps the wet potato dough from gluing itself to the iron and helps a dry crust form. Do it again on the second side after turning.
- Turning itA two-inch cake of potato dough is fragile. Slide it onto the covering plate, invert a second plate over it, and return it to the pan rather than attempting to flip it with a spatula.
- Yield and servingOne pan-sized cake, cut in wedges, serves four as a side or breakfast bread. Eaten hot with butter; leftovers are best sliced and re-crisped in a dry pan.
Potato cakes of this kind are often associated with the Irish and Scottish griddle-bread tradition, in which cold boiled potatoes left from dinner were bound with flour and cooked on a bakestone or in a covered pan the next morning, though no particular line of descent can be traced for this receipt. The Home Cook Book, compiled in Toronto in 1877 as a charity fundraiser for the Hospital for Sick Children, is a contributor cookbook, and the attribution to Mrs. S. McMaster is typical of its format: receipts frequently carry the name of the woman who supplied it. That format explains the vagueness of the proportions here, since these were notes exchanged between cooks who already knew what a potato dough should feel like, not instructions for beginners. The optional yeast is a small window into the period kitchen, where a cook might or might not have leavening on hand.