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How to Cook New Potatoes
After scraping them well, boil for twenty-five or thirty minutes in salted water. Drain them well and allow them to dry for a few minutes-then pour melted butter over them and serve. A little chopped parsley is an addition.
A method rather than a formula, and it works as well now as it did then, with two caveats: the boiling time assumes larger potatoes than most of us buy, and "scraping" is a step worth understanding before you skip it.
- Scraping, not peelingNew potatoes are lifted before the skin has set, so it rubs away under a stiff brush or the back of a knife under running water. The original says to scrape "well," which suggests taking most of the skin off, though a lighter scrape does no harm.
- The timing is for big potatoesThe timing is long -- Twenty-five to thirty minutes is longer than most modern cooks would give a new potato; the recipe specifies no size, and period timings for boiled potatoes generally ran long. Modern baby new potatoes, roughly golf-ball size, are done in 12 to 18 minutes; test with a skewer rather than the clock.
- Salted waterUse about a tablespoon of salt per 2 quarts. Potatoes take up salt slowly, so water salted too lightly tends to leave them tasting flat.
- The drying step is the hingeThe drying step -- The original simply lets the drained potatoes stand a few minutes; returning them to the dry hot pan for two or three minutes is a modern way of doing the same thing faster. Surface water left on them thins the butter and it pools rather than clings.
- Butter quantityThe original gives none. About 2 oz (4 tablespoons) melted butter per 2 lb of potatoes is generous without swamping them.
- ParsleyAdd it to the butter off the heat, or scatter it after saucing. Flat-leaf or curled both work; the parsley here is for colour as much as flavour.
- YieldReckon 6 to 8 oz of potatoes per person as a side dish, so 2 lb serves four.
"New" potatoes are not a variety but a stage: tubers dug young, before the plant has died back and before the skins have corked over, so their sugars have not yet converted fully to starch. They keep badly, which is why cookbooks of this period treat them as a brief seasonal event rather than a pantry staple — in Britain and the northern United States they arrived in early summer and were gone by high summer, and the Jersey and Ayrshire crops in particular were sold as a delicacy. The instruction to do almost nothing to them is the point. The new potato is boiled, dried, buttered and sent to table, on the reasonable assumption that anything more would be a waste of a short season.