Skip to main content
Main

Potato Cakes

A fried dish of mashed potatoes formed into cakes and cooked in fat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Potato and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,978 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Potato Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix cold mashed potatoes with the beaten egg yolk.

  2. Form the mixture into cakes like sausage patties.

Cook

  1. Heat the fat in a frying pan.

  2. Place the cakes in the hot fat and brown one side.

  3. Turn the cakes over and brown the other side.

  4. Serve hot for breakfast.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Potato + eggtop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,978 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cold mashed potatoes
Provide the bulk and starch that hold the cakes together and brown in the pan.
Egg yolk
Binds the potato mixture so the cakes hold their shape when formed and fried.
Fat
Conducts heat to the cakes and browns their surfaces in the frying pan.

The step that matters

Browning the first side. The cakes should not be moved until the first side is well browned, since a set crust releases cleanly and forms the golden surface. Turning too early can tear the cakes apart.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

More potato cakes recipes

Irish 4Mashed 4Sweet 4Fried 3Viennese 3 See all 131 →

You might also like

Potato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipesPotato ChipsPotato Chips53 recipesSweet Potato CroquettesSweet Potato Croquettes53 recipes