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New Potatoes
Wash, scrape, boil ten minutes, turn off water, and add enough more, boiling hot, to cover, also add a little salt; cook a few moments, drain, and set again on stove, add butter, salt, and pepper and a little thickening made of two table-spoons flour in about a pint of milk (a few small ones may be left in the kettle, and broken, not mashed with the potato-masher), put on the cover, and, when the milk has boiled, pour over potatoes and serve. Or, when cooked and drained, put in a skillet with hot drippings, cover, and shake till a nice brown.
A creamed new-potato dish from the era when the first small potatoes of the season were an event in themselves. The method is sound; only the vagueness about quantities and the odd double-boiling step need translating.
- The double boilingBoiling ten minutes, pouring off that water and covering again with fresh boiling water is a step the recipe does not explain; it may have been intended to rid very young potatoes of a 'strong' taste or of dirt left after scraping. It is unnecessary with clean modern potatoes; a single pot of salted water, 12-18 minutes depending on size, does the job.
- QuantitiesNo amount of potatoes is given. Two tablespoons of flour in a pint (2 cups) of milk makes a thin sauce suited to roughly 2 lb of small potatoes, serving four to six.
- ThickeningWhisk the flour into cold milk before heating, or it will lump. The instruction to cover and let the milk boil means cooking the sauce until it thickens and the raw flour taste goes, about three or four minutes at a simmer with stirring.
- Scraping, not peelingNew potatoes have skins thin enough to rub off with a cloth or the back of a knife under running water. Older potatoes will not scrape, and the recipe is not meant for them.
- The broken potatoesThe recipe offers this as an option: a few small ones may be left in the kettle and broken into the mass, where the starch from the crushed pieces gives body and helps keep the sauce from sliding off. Break them with a fork or the edge of a spoon and stop before they turn to puree -- the recipe is explicit that they are broken, 'not mashed with the potato-masher'.
- Drying before saucingAfter draining, set the pan back over low heat for a minute so the surface steam evaporates. Wet potatoes thin the milk and the sauce will pool.
- Drippings for the second method"Hot drippings" means saved beef, pork or bacon fat. Butter browns and burns faster; use clarified butter, bacon fat or a neutral oil, keep the skillet covered, and shake rather than stir so the skins do not tear.
New potatoes were a seasonal marker rather than a year-round staple: the small, thin-skinned tubers lifted before the plant died back, too fragile to store and so eaten within days of digging. Nineteenth-century American cookbooks often paired them with milk or cream, a combination that made a whole supper dish out of a vegetable and used the same white sauce that turned up over dried beef, codfish and eggs in the same books. Buckeye Cookery, published in 1877 as a revision of the 1876 Centennial Buckeye Cook Book, itself a fundraising community cookbook, is full of this kind of entry: a short method, no measured yield, two variations run together in one paragraph, written for a cook who already knew roughly how much butter went into a pan and needed only the sequence.