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Boiled Potatoes
Wash, scrub and pare one dozen medium-sized potatoes. If old, let them stand in cold water for several hours before paring, to freshen them. Cover with cold water, heat to boiling point, cover and boil fifteen minutes, then add salt, replace cover and cook until potatoes are soft (about fifteen minutes longer). Drain perfectly dry and shake the potatoes in a current of cold air. Place sauce-pan in a warm place, cover with a crash towel until ready to serve. as soon as possible, if you would have a mealy potato.
A method recipe rather than an ingredient list, and nearly all of the technique still holds. Two details deserve translation: the crash towel and the business of shaking the pan in cold air.
- The hinge: dry them hardDraining "perfectly dry" and shaking the pan in moving air is what makes a mealy potato. Surface moisture flashes off, the starch grains swell and separate, and the potatoes turn floury instead of slick. Return the drained pan to low heat for a minute if your kitchen is humid.
- Crash towelCrash was a coarse, loosely woven linen used for kitchen and roller towels. Any clean, thin cotton or linen tea towel does the same job: it absorbs escaping steam instead of letting it condense back onto the potatoes, which a tight lid would do.
- Choose a floury varietyMealiness is largely varietal. Russets or another high-starch baking potato will collapse into flour; Yukon Gold sits in the middle; red-skinned and other waxy potatoes will stay firm no matter how well you dry them.
- TimingThirty minutes total suits large potatoes left whole. Medium potatoes of about 6 oz are usually tender in 20 to 25 minutes from the boil, and quartered ones in 12 to 15. Test with a thin skewer at the center rather than trusting the clock.
- Salt at the startThe recipe holds the salt back until the potatoes have boiled fifteen minutes; no reason is given, and adding it at the outset does no harm. Salt the water from the beginning, about a tablespoon per 4 quarts, or the interiors come out bland.
- Soaking old potatoesThe several-hour cold soak was meant to freshen stored potatoes that had gone limp. It still works on shrivelled ones. It will not rescue potatoes that have sprouted heavily or greened; discard those.
- Uniform sizeThe recipe assumes twelve potatoes of one size, and that assumption matters. Cut larger ones down to match the smaller so they finish together, otherwise the outsides of the big ones disintegrate while the centers are still hard.
- Yield and the last lineA dozen medium potatoes serve six to eight as a side dish. The closing sentence is garbled in the original printing; the sense is plainly that boiled potatoes should be served as soon as possible, since holding them in the covered pan eventually undoes the drying.
Boiled potatoes appear in a Sunday-dinner book not because they need a recipe but because getting them mealy rather than sodden was considered a test of a cook, and household writers of the period returned to it constantly. The obsession with a floury, bursting potato was partly varietal history: the ideal potato was one that fell apart under a fork. The cook would be working through new-dug potatoes as well as the tail of last year's cellar stock, which is why the recipe bothers to distinguish old potatoes and prescribe a soak. The instruction to shake the pan in a current of cold air is a genuinely old kitchen practice, often said to have been repeated in English and American manuals, and it rests on sound physics even where the explanations given for it at the time did not.