Potato Cakes

Growing up, dinner without potatoes was unheard of. Meat vegetables and potatoes. Potatoes were not counted as vegeatables they were a totally separate item.

I love potatoes in nearly all it’s formats. However my favourite would be potato cakes. The crusty outside, succulent taste of potato inside and eaten immediately off the pan.

Potato cakes are a wonderful way of using up left-over potatoes whether baked or mashed.  Then again some say that in order to make the lightest potato cakes one has to use freshly mashed potatoes.  But I say each to his own.  Both have worked for me.

I have grown up with cold mashed potatoes to which salt pepper and flour were added.  The dough was rolled out thickly and the small cakes fried on the frying pan.

Now a friend whose mother was from Dublin always had chopped raw onions and parsley added to them.  However, another had cooked onions added and never parsley.

In Theodora Fitzgibbon’s book “A taste of Ireland in Food and in Pictures” first published in 1968 the recipe for potato cakes does not specify what type of mashed potato.  A few pages further into the book she has a recipe for “Bacon, Eggs and Potato Cakes” which specifies freshly mashed potatoes. 

Then there are the potato cakes which are baked in the oven.  These are remarkably similar to savoury scones but feel much lighter.  They usually contain herbs and /or scallions also known as spring onions.

I must mention here that potato cakes can also be sweet.  A neighbour used make an apple plate which had a round of potato then chopped apples and covered again by potato.  The potato was the base of the pastry. 

Jenny Bristow in her book “Jenny Bristow’s today & Everyday Cookbook” published in 1993 has a recipe for “Very Irish Potato Apple Cake and on reading this recipe it certainly sounded similar to my neighbour’s apple cake.

Other countries have their own potato cakes or recipes where cooked mashed potatoes are used.

Recently I was shown a copy of a recipe found for “Potato Biscuits”.  This recipe originated in Iowa, dated around 1930.  It is remarkably similar to the savoury potato cakes baked in the oven.  Over 3.5 thousand miles separating both the recipes but so similar.

Then everyone knows of Gnocchi. The popular Italian dish made from mashed potatoes. The ingredients are very similar to those used in Irish potato however, gnocchi are cooked in hot water or hot stock. I think it is time for me to research recipes from other countries which used mashed potatoes as the core ingredient.