My Boxty

Potato cakes were very much a part of the culinary repertoire at home when I was growing up.
Any time we had a fry , which could be either for breakfast or tea (that being the meal we had in the evening, dinner was eaten in the middle of the day) and there was some left over mashed potato , potato cakes would be made.
The mash would be augmented by a couple of handfuls of flour , made into a pastry like consistency and then rolled out, cut into triangles and fried in the bacon fat in the pan.

The resulting cakes were not my favourites , I always found that they left an unpleasant taste which I later realised was the taste of the raw flour, not cooked out by the brief frying.

However Potato Cakes as very much a traditional Irish dish so when I ran my restaurant I was determined to make a version I liked .

I ended up completely leaving out the flour , mixing the mash into a soft dough with
an egg or two, then forming them into patties, coating them in egg and breadcrumbs and shallow frying them in olive oil.
These were , I thought , delicious and I used them frequently in Dwyers as a basis for various starters of Prawns in Herb Butter , Smoked Salmon with Horseradish ,Lambs Kidneys in Manzinilla and Scallops in Garlic .

My Scallops in Garlic on a Potato Cake as photographed by Caitriona some years ago.

Last night I started to cook dinner and then discovered that, except for three medium sized spuds and a bowl of left over mash in the fridge I was out of potatoes .
To save my self the run down to the Super U just for spuds I racked my brains for a way out.

Now I had already decided that we were having some fillets of John Dory , breaded and shallow fried with some Lemon Mayonnaise and some quick fried Florence Fennel on the side.
With this combination neither rice nor pasta were appropriate.

Boxty seemed the obvious solution.
This is traditionally made with a combination of mash, flour and grated raw potato made into cakes and fried.
I decided to give the dish the same treatment as I had the potato cake by leaving out the flour and getting the egg to hold the mixture together.
It worked , we all thought, extremely well.

My Boxty.

250 g Cooked Mash Potato
250g Peeled Grated Raw Potato
2 Eggs
Salt and Black Pepper
Olive Oil for frying
Once you have grated the potato you want to work fairly quickly as they tend to turn blue , this doesn’t seem to affect the taste but doesn’t look great.

Mix the mash with the eggs to a smooth mixture with a beater or a wooden spoon.
Stir in the grated potato and a liberal seasoning of salt and pepper.

Heat the oil in a heavy pan and when hot drop tablespoons of the mixture on the pan and flatten it out a little with the back of the spoon.
Cook until browned, flip these and brown on the other side.

Keep these warm in a warm oven while you are cooking the rest.

( I haven’t tried as yet but I am sure that if you added some chopped herbs or even grated cheese to the mixture they would be good just on their own)