Virginia Potato Bread: Indeed, we all preferred it to the cake

We've trusted random people who submit to the Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange, but now it's time to bring in professionals.

Virginia Potato Bread 1½ cup mashed potatoes 2½ tbsp butter or shortening ½ cup milk ¼ cup sugar 1½ tsp salt 1 egg ½ envelope (or 1⅛ tsp) dry yeast About 3½ cups flour In a large, microwave-safe bowl or a large saucepan, scald the milk. Stir in the shortening until it is melted. Then stir in the sugar and allow to cool to 80°. Whisk in the mashed potatoes, egg, and yeast. Then stir in enough flour to make a firm, workable dough. (It should be supple, not crumbly.) Knead for 15 minutes. Rinse the bowl, wipe it dry, grease it, and place the dough back in it. Then spritz the top of the dough with cooking spray, or brush with oil or melted shortening. (This helps prevent the dough from crusting over.) Put the dough in a warm, draft-free place and allow to rise for three hours. Punch or knead down, then allow to rise one hour more. Place the dough on a floured board and shape into a loaf. Place in a well-greased loaf pan and let rise 45 minutes. When ready to bake, heat oven to 375°. Bake for 30 minutes. Then reduce heat to 350° and bake 20 minutes more. Note: If using leftover homemade mashed potatoes, you can eliminate any tiny spud lumps by putting the potatoes in a blender with the milk and the egg. Note 2: This is halved from the original recipe. Note 3: Check whether your bread is baked a lot earlier than you may think! Mine was done after 30 minutes. "Ask Mrs. Wilson," Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, March 4 1919, page 14

That pudding recipe is already on my list of things to make.

A decade or two before the Philadelphia Inquirer trusted its readers to come up with their own recipes for the weekly Recipe Exchange, the Philadelphia newsreading public had Mrs. Wilson, a former "personal cuisiniere to Queen Victoria." After she was done with Buckingham Palace, she apparently returned to the United States and wrote for the newspaper. As she proudly listed on the title page of her cookbook, she was also a home economics teacher for the University of Virginia and a cooking instructor for the U.S. Navy. 

Here's the photograph that introduced her to everyone reading the newspaper. She looks ready to take on the people of the greater Philadelphia area, don't you think?

Apparently Mrs. Wilson was an early pioneer in the art of being a multimedia cooking expert, because outside of her newspaper column she made short films demonstrating recipes that were quite the event in the Philadelphia movie theaters. Or maybe the theater owners wanted to come up with more reasons to get the public to come in on weekday afternoons. At any rate, little announcements like this regularly appear under her headlines.

Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, September 29 1919, page 12

Mrs. Wilson wrote all her introductory articles and gave her recipes in a crisp, home-economics-teacher style. Similarly, her recipes often seem to come out of an early-1900s domestic science textbook. Each page begins with a short article and a few recipes Mrs. Wilson thinks we need this week. The rest of the page is given to answering reader's questions. All of the reader questions are written in a flattering tone, opening with "My dear Mrs. Wilson," which according to basic secretarial practice is the standard salutation for informal correspondence. 

All of Mrs. Wilson's answers are bluntly terse (but in a ladylike way). She also does not repeat recipes, ever. Whenever someone writes in asking for a recipe that she published, she tells them to go to the newspaper office and have someone pull the relevant backissue for them. Have a look at how she knocks out four questions in one short paragraph.

At least Dear Abby reprints the pecan pie recipe every year.

Take a look at how politely she prepared one hopeful reader for disappointment.

Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, June 23 1919, page 14

 

I love how quickly we collectively ditched the cooking fireplace as soon as the kitchen stove hit the mass market. Only two generations earlier, fellow Philadelphian Miss Leslie's best-selling cookbooks taught how to cook everything on a fireplace. By the time Mrs. Wilson had a newspaper contract, she apparently couldn't even say something like "If your kitchen still has that old-fashioned thing your grandmother used..." By 1919, we already had electric stoves. 

Indeed, even the curt Mrs. Wilson praised the modern electric "fireless cooker" as enthusiastically as I endorse the dishwasher. "Fireless cookers" were considered the most modern way to cook in the early 1900s. They were sort of the forerunners of the countertop slow cooker. Fireless cookers were airtight boxes that were so insulated as to barely need any heat (say, a single oil lamp) to slowly cook food over several hours. To people used to cooking over blazing coal stoves or wood fireplaces, fireless cookers must have been a welcome change.

For our first attempt at one of Mrs. Wilson's recipes, we're making potato bread! Ms. H.L.S., the person who wrote in to request the recipe, says that "The bread itself was snow white and fine; delicious as any white mountain cake I have ever tasted. Indeed, we all preferred it to the cake," which is a bold claim. We had to find out. At the beginning of the recipe, you're supposed to mash your own potatoes and then force them through a sieve to eliminate absolutely all the lumps. We at A Book of Cookrye have an easier way to make perfectly smooth mashed potatoes:

I don't think Mrs. Wilson would object to using instant potato flakes instead of boiling and sieving the spuds for ourselves. In the preface of her cookbook (which you can download and read for free here), she writes that "economical, palatable food is within your reach if you will discard the ideas and methods of long ago. Remember, you would not prefer to ride in a horse car, as a means of conveyance, so why use the recipes of those days?"

Perfectly smooth, without resorting to a sieve.

Speaking of moving our cooking techniques out of the horsedrawn days, we did the milk-heating and shortening-melting business without even touching the stove! As previously discussed, the microwave can do so many things in the kitchen if you just let it.

We needed to cool the milk back down lest the yeast get cooked before it can raise the bread. In the pre-dishwasher days (which I am so glad are behind me), I would have done the milk-scalding in the same big bowl I would use for the whole bread recipe. But since it is nearly no extra effort to place an additional cup with the other dirty dishes in the machine, I could scald the milk in its own little container and then pour it into a stone-cold mixing bowl. After thirty seconds of swishing the milk in the bowl, we were ready to, as the kids apparently say, get this bread.

At this stage, this recipe looked a lot like Elizabeth's Rolls. Both of them start off with a thin, gravy-like batter that involves mashed potatoes and yeast. The recipes diverge at this point, where Mrs. Wilson tells us to add all of the flour at once instead of adding only a small part of the flour and letting the yeast have a feast before adding the rest.

At this point, we are directed to knead this dough for fifteen minutes. That is a long time to spend working dough. At first I thought it was a mistype of 5 minutes. However, while someone in the Evening Ledger's typesetting department may have absent-mindedly grabbed two numerals out of a type drawer, I doubt they would have picked up and set all the letters required to spell the word "fifteen" without realizing the mistake. Therefore, I kneaded the dough for fifteen minutes as directed. The dough felt so right while kneading. It was warm, wonderfully soft, supple, and--- well, it felt like a big hug for my hands. Towards the end of the fifteen minutes, the dough actually got springy and snappy in a way that boded very well for the recipe. This is only our first recipe from Ask Mrs. Wilson, and so far, her directions are correct down to the last tick of the clock.

After kneading, we are directed to let the bread rise for three hours. I didn't think we would need such a long time because of our newfound method of heating up the oven with a pot of boiled water. (Obviously, people have been using this method for a long time, but it took me until last year to find out about it for myself.) But after 45 minutes, the dough looked resolutely unchanged, with barely a suggestion of puffiness. Even though it looked like I had just wasted time and flour, I figured it couldn't hurt to just leave the dough where I parked it.

Indeed, after three hours, the bread dough decided spring to yeasty life! I have to again give Mrs. Wilson credit: so far her recipe works and her times are correct. This doesn't always happen. We've long learned that just because a recipe is in print doesn't mean that it will work. But behold how much this bread decided to rise while I wasn't looking!

Mrs. Wilson directs us to punch or knead the dough down and then return it to its cozy leavening nest for another hour. When I punched the dough down, it felt so dang nice in my hands- it was soft and yet still springy from the extra-long kneading. I've never had bread dough that felt so satisfying to handle. I had my doubts that it would rise again in one hour when last time it needed thrice that. But sure enough, our bread was marvelously airy in exactly the time Mrs. Wilson specified. It seemed less like risen bread dough and more like a delicate foam.

At this point, Mrs. Wilson's recipe gets less precise than it had been heretofore. She just says "mold into loaves and then place in well-greased pans." How many loaves should we be making? How big should they be? Does she mean freestanding loaves that you bake on flat metal sheets, or do we need loaf pans to keep the bread from turning into a flat dough puddle? If one reads the sentence slowly, one notices that she says to place IN pans, not ON them. I figured that no one bakes things IN a flat cookie sheet, so I got out a loaf pan.

While the bread is rising, I would like to make a short point about how much I love dishwashers. I've often mentioned that I hate pre-rinsing dishes and refuse to ever do it. This brings us to the aftermath of this recipe, which was piled up in the sink. As anyone who makes bread knows, you have a gummy, hard, paste-like residue on the bowl that requires hard scouring to get off. However, I just put the bowl upside-down on the dishwasher rack looking like this:

You may think I found cooked-on dough clumps after the dishwasher finished its cycle, but the bowl cameo out perfect and spotless. As I have often said, Life is too wonderful to spend it doing the dishwasher's work for it. It's a dishWASHER, not a dish-BAPTIZER. Don't rinse and scrub the dishes before putting them in the machine. It will get them clean while you do literally anything else.

Let us now return to the recipe! Mrs. Wilson's rising times are extraordinarily accurate. I can't put microbes on tight schedule, but apparently Mrs. Wilson can. At this point, I just trusted the former personal cuisiniere to Queen Victoria, set a timer for 45 minutes, and left it. Indeed, the bread had risen to the perfect height and was ready to bake after 45 minutes.

Those of you keeping track will note that the bread had been rising for almost 5 hours at this point. Obviously the long rising time wasn't a bother- it's not like I spent 5 hours working away. However, others in the house had minor objections to how long the bread spent minding its own yeast business. Someone said "You know what I hate about bread? It smells so good but you can't have it yet!"

Fortunately for everyone in the house, the bread was done long before Mrs. Wilson claimed it would be. I don't blame her for the incorrect timing since I left the pan of dough in the oven while it heated up instead of removing it for preheating purposes. After the making the house smell so good for half the day, everyone was ready to cut into this barely after removing it from the oven.

I should note that when I tried to cut it into thin slices, the bread did not let that happen. (Maybe I need a freshly sharpened bread knife.) 

However, when you cut it into slices that almost qualify for Texas Toast, which incidentally I did not first encounter in Texas.

The crust on this crackled when I cut it. The inside was so beautifully fluffy. This tastes like what you hope for when someone says they're bringing homemade bread. If you want to make homemade bread that tastes like you've been baking for years but you haven't, definitely give this recipe a go! At first, I expressed the thought that I should have put the bread dough in a muffin pan instead of making a loaf that would go stale before we ate it all. My attempt at practicality was defeated with one sharp question: "But how could we make sandwiches with it?"

And while this bread is so delicious that you could just stand over the cutting board and eat it as you slice more off, it also makes delicious sandwiches. It also made the best grilled cheese I've had in a long time. 

We will definitely be revisiting this bread recipe- and perhaps often. The long time it spends rising doesn't bother me because I don't even need to stay in the house! This is easily the best white bread I've made aside from Elizabeth's rolls. Which, come to think of it, both of them contain mashed potatoes. Maybe every truly great bread needs spuds.