Potato Scallion Cakes

It’s not hard to find sweet baking recipes that take advantage of leftover mashed potatoes. But the seasoning complicates matters: You can’t put last night’s garlic mash into chocolate cake or doughnuts. Or, at least, you shouldn’t. Casual bread bakers might work their clumpy potato remnants into flatbreads or country loaves; I bet they’ve saved the potato cooking water, too. Good for them! But the rest of us want something simpler, something we’d actually be ready to cook the day after a big feast—something that could work with any family’s mashed potato dregs, and make them feel new. Maybe something that would go really well with fried eggs.

I found the solution in cookbook author Bert Greene’s fritterra—mashed potatoes seasoned and shaped into a cake, then griddled, like you’ve probably seen before, but with a few smart improvements. “It was a gift from a taxi driver,” Greene writes in the recipe’s headnote, “who related it in pieces—each time we stopped for a light.”

He uses a lot of scallions, but briefly boils them first—a quick extra step that packs in fresh greenness without the bite of raw alliums. And to bind the cakes, Greene uses bread crumbs instead of flour because they don’t go gummy when introduced to liquid and are much more forgiving. These upgrades make for an altogether lighter than average potato cake, and therefore a reasonable postfeast breakfast (or lunch, or dinner)

Serves 4

12 whole scallions, bulbs and green tops

2 large eggs, lightly beaten
¼ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
½ teaspoon salt (see Genius Tips)
Freshly ground black pepper
¼ cup (15g) fresh bread crumbs
1½ cups (315g) cold mashed potatoes
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 tablespoons vegetable oil

1.Wash and trim the scallions, leaving about 2 inches (5cm) of green stems. Cook in boiling water until tender, about 5 minutes. Drain and finely chop.

2. Place the scallions in a bowl. Add the eggs, nutmeg, salt, pepper to taste, bread crumbs, and mashed potatoes. Mix well.

3. Heat the oils in a large skillet until hot but not smoking. Shape the onion-potato mixture into patties, using 2 rounded tablespoons of the mixture for each patty. Fry about six at a time until golden brown on both sides, 2 or 3 minutes per side. Keep warm while frying the remaining patties. Serve warm.

GENIUS TIPS

Chop the blanched scallions finely, or the cakes will break along scallion fault lines as they fry. And don’t be shy with the heat; searing them quickly helps hold the loose batter together—this will keep you from adding too many bread crumbs, which, after a certain point, you will regret.

Depending on what you’ve already got in your mashed potatoes, you may not need much salt, if any. If you want to be safe, undersalt the mix at first and fry off a tiny test cake, then adjust accordingly.