Taste of History is a limited-run blog series exploring old-school recipes and food culture found in archival collections. This month we are trying something special for a holiday crowd, potato apples!
The trend of disguising food as different things has been around for a long time. Today, we can see it in the online trend turned game show “Is this cake?” but historically it often involved making food appear to be another type of food. This seems to have been largely a status symbol, because of the extra time and skill required to shape these items. This technique was also used to make foods appear like something that was more expensive or rare. For example, “City Chicken” or “Mock Chicken” from the Great Lakes region was a way to disguise less expensive types of meat as chicken.
Our example recipe is potato apples. As the name suggests, this dish is a mixture of potatoes and cheese, shaped to look like an apple. The recipe was first published in The Household Science Book of Recipes in 1933. The book was edited by Annie L. Laird and Edna W. Park who were both professors in Household and Nutritional Science at the University of Toronto.
The first step in the recipe is to rice the potatoes. Since I don’t have a ricer, I ended up grating them with a coarse cheese grater, which worked well for a relatively small amount. However, it made the process much slower, and that let the potatoes cool. Resultantly, the cheese would not melt enough for a smooth texture without some additional heating. However, the mixture came together quickly, and held up to being shaped, battered, and deep fried.
I ended up making a few changes to the recipe. First, instead of using bread crumbs I used gluten free panko, which worked very well. Second, I used a fairly mild cheese and after trying the first one I ended up adding some black pepper to give them some more flavor. If I make them again I think I would use a sharper cheese, but otherwise I have no complaints. They turned out delicious, with just the right amount of crunch. While I might not have had the artistic talent to make them really look like apples, they were a big hit at home, and here in the office, so I will definitely try this recipe again.
