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Franconia Potatoes
Wash and pare six medium-sized potatoes; parboil five minutes. Drain dry. Place on grate around roast beef. Baste with fat in pan when basting roast. Bake from thirty to thirty-five minutes, turning often or when basting roast. Sprinkle with salt and serve surrounding rolled roast, alternating with Stuffed Tomatoes.
A straightforward roast-pan potato, but the timing assumes a hot oven and a roast already in it. A few points make it work in a modern kitchen.
- The hingeParboil only five minutes, then drain and let the surface steam dry before the potatoes touch fat. Wet potatoes will not brown, and they will not take on the beef drippings.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature; it is written to piggyback on a roast, so use whatever the beef requires. In a slower oven the potatoes will likely need longer than the thirty-five minutes given here; in a hot oven the original timing is about right.
- "Place on grate"The potatoes go on the roasting rack beside the meat, not in the liquid at the bottom. If your rack is a fine grid, set them directly in the pan around the roast instead and turn them more often.
- Potato varietyA floury potato — russet or Idaho — gives the fluffy interior and crisp shell this method is after. Waxy reds and new potatoes stay dense and never quite crust.
- BastingBeef fat only, and only what has already rendered. If the roast is lean, add a spoonful of tallow or a neutral oil to the pan so the potatoes have something to fry in.
- TurningTurn every ten to fifteen minutes so all faces get pan contact. Uneven turning gives one crisp side and three pale ones.
- YieldSix potatoes serve four to six as written, one to one and a half each alongside the roast and tomatoes.
Franconia potatoes are the American cookbook name for potatoes roasted in the drippings around a joint of meat, and the term turns up steadily in late nineteenth and early twentieth century household manuals -- Fannie Farmer among them -- usually with the same parboil-then-roast instruction. The name's origin is not documented. The dish itself is simply the ordinary English and German practice of cooking roots under or beside the roast to catch the fat, a habit as old as the spit and the dripping pan. Its place in a book of Sunday dinners is practical: the potatoes need no separate pan, no separate fuel, and no attention beyond the basting the cook is already doing, which mattered in a coal or early gas oven where every extra dish cost heat and space.