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Franconia Potatoes
Pare 10 medium-sized potatoes; parboil five minutes. Place on grate under roast ribs of beef. Baste with melted Crisco, and bake from 20 to 30 minutes, turning often.
A side dish designed to cook itself while the beef roasts. The only real difficulty is that the original assumes a roast sitting on a rack high in the oven with a pan or grate beneath it to catch the fat.
- The hinge: dry, roughened potatoesDrain the parboiled potatoes thoroughly and let the surface steam off for a minute before they meet the fat. A wet skin steams rather than browns, and no amount of basting will fix it.
- "Under roast ribs of beef"The potatoes were set on a grate or in the drip pan below the roast so the beef fat fell on them. In a modern oven, arrange them in a single layer in the roasting pan around the meat, or on a separate shallow pan on a lower rack.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none; the potatoes simply went under whatever heat the rib roast required. A rib roast is usually finished around 350F today, which serves as a reasonable working figure.
- TimingTwenty to thirty minutes may brown them without cooking a medium potato through, even parboiled. If so, allow longer and judge by a skewer sliding in with no resistance.
- CriscoThe all-vegetable shortening this book was written to promote. Any neutral high-heat fat works; rendered beef fat or drippings from the roast itself give the closest result to what the original produced by accident.
- Turning oftenEvery 10 to 15 minutes is enough. Turning more than that keeps knocking the crust off before it sets.
- YieldTen medium potatoes serve six to eight alongside a roast.
Franconia potatoes are simply potatoes roasted in the fat of the joint, a method that predates the name by centuries; American cookbooks from the late nineteenth century onward use "Franconia" as a standing term for the browned potato served with roast beef. The origin of the label is uncertain: it is commonly linked to the Franconia region of Germany, but that is traditional attribution rather than documented fact. The recipe appears here because A Calendar of Dinners was written for Procter & Gamble to demonstrate Crisco, introduced in 1911, in every corner of the day's menus, which is why melted shortening stands in for the beef dripping a cook of the period would otherwise have used.