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Roast New Potatoes
Select uniform-sized new potatoes, wash and scrub them with a brush, pare and parboil ten to fifteen minutes (according to the size) in boiling salted water. Drain and place them around rack in dripping pan in which meat is roasting and cook until tender. Baste occasionally with fat in pan when basting roast.
A straightforward method that still works: the parboil is what gives roast potatoes a floury outside that crisps in the meat fat. A few details need translating from a 1913 coal-range kitchen.
- The hinge is the parboilTen to fifteen minutes in salted water roughs up the surface starch, which is what browns and crisps. Drain them thoroughly and let the steam blow off for a minute before they go in the pan; wet potatoes will steam rather than roast.
- New potatoes, meaning waxyTrue new potatoes are freshly lifted and thin-skinned, and they stay firm rather than fluffing. The recipe tells you to pare them, though modern practice is usually to leave the skins on new potatoes for flavour and texture.
- Rack and dripping panA dripping pan is simply the roasting pan; the rack holds the joint above the rendered fat. Sitting the potatoes on the pan floor around the rack puts them directly in that fat, which is the point.
- TemperatureThe oven is whatever the roast needs; the recipe itself specifies no temperature. In a modern oven at roughly 325-350F allow 45 minutes to an hour for parboiled potatoes; if the roast is resting, finish them alone at 425F for 15 minutes to crisp.
- Don't crowd the panPotatoes packed tightly against each other or against the joint will not colour. Leave space between them and turn them once or twice when you baste, so all sides meet the fat.
- QuantityThe original gives no yield. Figure 5 to 6 oz of potatoes per person, or two to three small new potatoes each alongside a roast.
- If your roast is leanA modern beef or pork roast may not throw enough fat to baste with. Add a few tablespoons of dripping, duck fat or oil to the pan so the potatoes have something to fry in.
Roasting potatoes in the drippings beneath the joint is older than the recipe book and older than the closed oven: on a spit, the pan set below caught the fat and anything else you cared to cook in it, which is the same logic that produced Yorkshire pudding. New potatoes are a seasonal marker, lifted young and small in early summer before the crop is left to mature and store, so an American household in 1913 would have had them for a limited season rather than year round. The instruction to scrub with a brush also belongs to a time when potatoes came out of the ground caked rather than washed and bagged.