Home › Vegetables › Baked Potatoes
Baked Potatoes
-Mrs. E. R. Persons.
Select large potatoes and see that they have no bad spots; wash them and bake in a quick oven until soft. To be eaten with butter and salt. This is the most wholesome way of cooking potatoes, and especially nice for invalids.
About as short as a recipe gets, and the only real variables are oven heat and how you treat the skin. A few notes fill in what Mrs. Persons assumed her readers already knew.
- "A quick oven"Read this as roughly 400-450F. At that heat a large potato takes about 50 to 60 minutes; the flesh should give completely when squeezed and a skewer should meet no resistance in the center.
- Choose a mealy potatoThe recipe specifies only "large potatoes," but a high-starch baker such as a russet gives the dry, fluffy interior this method suits; waxy red or new potatoes turn dense and gluey.
- Pierce before bakingPrick each potato several times with a fork so steam escapes. Unvented potatoes occasionally split open in a hot oven, and the trapped steam waterlogs the flesh.
- No foil, no pan liquidBake directly on the rack or on a bare sheet. Wrapping in foil steams the potato and softens the skin, which defeats the crisp jacket that makes this version worth doing.
- Bad spotsThe instruction to check for them still holds. Cut away any green patches or sprouting eyes before baking, and discard potatoes that are extensively green or shriveled.
- Serve at onceSplit the potato as soon as it comes out so the steam can leave, then add butter and salt. A baked potato held in a warm oven soon turns soggy.
- YieldOne large potato per person as a side dish.
The note that this is "especially nice for invalids" places the recipe squarely in a nineteenth-century tradition of sickroom cookery, which occupied a chapter or a scattering of entries in many American household manuals of the period. Convalescent diets favored plain, unseasoned, easily digested food, and the dry-baked potato — cooked without fat until the starch was fully softened — was widely recommended over boiled or fried potatoes on the grounds that it was lighter on the stomach. The claim that baking is "the most wholesome way of cooking potatoes" reflects the same reasoning: nothing is added, nothing leaches into the cooking water, and the nutrients just under the skin stay where they are — an argument that holds, at least, for the water-soluble vitamins otherwise lost to the cooking water. Recipes like this one, credited to a named contributor, also show the compiled-community-cookbook method behind books of this kind, where neighbors submitted family standards however brief.