the Bernese potato cake of coarsely grated boiled potatoes crisped in butter, with no egg and no flour in it
Origin: Bern & the Swiss Plateau
From the journey of Potato.
A rösti contains potato, fat, and salt. That is the whole of it, and the purist position in Switzerland is that anything else in the pan makes it something other than a rösti. There is no egg and no flour, because neither is needed: the potatoes are boiled the day before in their skins, cooled overnight in the refrigerator, then peeled and grated coarsely, and the surface starch on the cold shreds is what binds the cake together as it cooks. Boiled the same morning they are too wet, and grated raw they release water into the pan and stew rather than crisp. It began as a Bernese farmers' breakfast, eaten before the day's work at an hour when a cake of potato fried in lard or butter was the most useful thing a kitchen could produce. The potato reached the Swiss cantons in the seventeenth century as a garden curiosity, spread through the eighteenth as a field crop, and became a staple in earnest after the European harvest failures of 1770 and 1771. Rösti belongs to the century that followed, when a Swiss household could count on potatoes in a way it could not count on grain. Its modern fame is as much political as culinary. The Röstigraben, the rösti ditch, is the standing Swiss term for the cultural and political divide between the German-speaking and French-speaking parts of the country, running roughly along the Saane. It names something measurable: the two halves vote differently on Europe, on the army, and on social policy with striking regularity. The word itself is twentieth-century, and the divide it describes became visible during the First World War when German and French Switzerland found their sympathies pointing in opposite directions. Regional versions exist despite the purists. Bern keeps it plain, Zurich adds bacon and onion, and a rösti with a fried egg on top or under a plate of Zürcher Geschnetzeltes is standard restaurant fare across the German-speaking cantons.
The overnight chill is the whole technique and there is no way round it. Use waxy potatoes such as Charlotte or Nicola; floury ones fall apart into a mash under the grater. The pan must be heavy enough to hold an even heat, and the cake needs enough fat to fry rather than dry out, so do not economise on the butter. Adding flour or egg to help it bind is exactly what the recipe does not want: it produces a potato pancake, which is a good thing, but not this thing.
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