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Potatoes, Browned Under a Roasting Joint
Half boil eight or ten large kidney potatoes. Drain the water from them, flour them well, and lay them in an earthen dish or a tin pan. Put this in the dripping-pan under the meat, and baste the potatoes liberally from time to time. When they are browned on one side turn them upon the other. Before sending to table, place them on blotting-paper or on a sieve, to clear them from fat, and serve very hot. The potatoes may be either put on a separate dish or placed round the joint they are to accompany. Time to boil the potatoes, about a quarter of an hour; to brown them, one hour or more. Probable cost of potatoes, 1d. or 1 1/2d. per pound. Allow two or three for each person.
A roast-potato method built around an open dripping-pan under a spit or in a hearth oven. The technique survives intact; only the apparatus needs translating.
- The hinge: parboil, then rough the surfaceThe flouring only works if the potatoes are drained bone-dry and the surface is slightly broken up. Give them a shake in the dry pan over low heat for a minute before dusting with flour, or the coating will slide off in the fat.
- Kidney potatoesAn old term for waxy, oval-fleshed varieties of the Kidney or Fluke type. Yukon Gold, Charlotte or any firm yellow-fleshed potato behaves the same way; floury bakers will collapse over an hour of basting.
- "Half boil" and the quarter hourFifteen minutes is right for large potatoes only if they are whole. A knife should meet resistance at the centre. Halve or quarter very large ones and cut the time accordingly.
- The dripping-panThis assumes meat suspended above an open pan catching fat. In a modern oven, set the potatoes in a separate shallow tin on the shelf below the roast, and spoon fat over them from the roasting tin rather than relying on drips.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none; browning under a joint for an hour implies an ordinary roasting heat, so roughly 375-425F in a modern oven. At the lower end allow the full hour or more; at the higher end check at about 40 minutes and turn once they have coloured.
- Basting versus a hot tinLiberal basting is the period method and it works, but the crispest result comes from having the fat already smoking in the tin when the potatoes go in, then basting only two or three times.
- Blotting-paperKitchen paper or a wire rack. Drain them for no more than a minute or two, uncovered, or the crust softens as steam is trapped underneath.
- YieldTwo or three potatoes per person, as the original says, means eight to ten large ones serve three to five alongside a joint.
Potatoes cooked in the fat falling from a roast are as old as the dripping-pan itself: before the closed range, meat turned on a spit before the fire and a long shallow pan below caught every drop of fat, which was too valuable to waste. Basting vegetables in it was thrift as much as cookery, and dripping that was not used at once was saved for pastry, frying and for spreading on bread. The prices quoted, a penny to three-halfpence a pound, mark potatoes as the cheapest bulk on the late-Victorian table, which is why a household book could tell the cook to allow two or three a head without comment. The "kidney" potatoes named here belong to a family of waxy long varieties much grown in Britain in the nineteenth century, of which the Jersey Royal (the International Kidney) is the best-known survivor.