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Potatoes, New, Boiled
Take freshly-dug new potatoes. Wash them well, and rub off the skin with a flannel or a coarse cloth. Throw them into boiling salted water, in which a sprig of mint may be put if the flavour is not disliked, and let them simmer gently until they are quite tender. Pour off the liquid, and let the potatoes stand by the side of the fire with the lid only half on the saucepan, till they are thoroughly dry. Put a slice of butter into a hot vegetable tureen, pile the potatoes over this, and serve very hot. New potatoes should be cooked before they have been twenty-four hours out of the ground. Although agreeable to the taste, they are by no means so digestible as fully-grown tubers. Time to boil, fifteen to thirty minutes, according to size. Probable cost, 1d. to 1 1/2d. per pound. Sufficient, three pounds for six persons.
A straightforward method that still produces the best new potatoes, provided you resist the urge to peel them properly. A few of its assumptions belong to a household with a kitchen garden and a coal range.
- Rubbing, not peelingThe flannel is doing real work: a genuinely fresh new potato has a skin so thin it comes away under friction alone. If a knife or peeler is needed, the potatoes are no longer new in the sense meant here, and are better scrubbed and boiled in their skins.
- The twenty-four hour ruleVery little sold in a shop will meet it. Farmers' market or home-grown potatoes dug that morning come closest; much of what is sold as "new" has been in storage for some time. It will taste good but may not have the sugary, faintly earthy quality the writer assumes.
- Start in boiling waterUnusually for potatoes, new ones go into water already boiling, which sets the outside and keeps the small tubers from disintegrating. Old floury potatoes are started cold; do not swap the methods.
- The drying-off step is the hingeDrained potatoes left over very low heat with the lid ajar shed surface water as steam, so the butter coats them instead of sliding off into a puddle. Two or three minutes on the smallest burner does what the side of the fire did.
- TimingFifteen to thirty minutes covers a wide span of sizes, as the recipe itself says. Marble-sized ones can be tender in eight to twelve minutes; test with a skewer rather than the clock.
- MintA sprig in the water, not chopped over the top, as the recipe has it. It perfumes rather than flavours; add chopped mint at the end only if you want it assertive.
- Vegetable tureenA covered serving dish, warmed. A warmed bowl with a lid or a plate over it does the same job, and matters more than it sounds: new potatoes go cold and waxy fast.
- Yield and costThree pounds for six is right for a dish served alongside two or three other things. The prices, 1d. to 1 epence to 1½d. a pound, are pre-decimal pence.
New potatoes in late nineteenth-century Britain arrived in a short, early season -- first from Cornwall and the Channel Islands, then from gardens and allotments -- and the whole point was immediacy, hence the insistence on twenty-four hours from the ground. The pairing with mint is long-established in English kitchens, though the frequently repeated link to mint with lamb and peas, all three arriving together in early summer, is tradition rather than documented fact. The aside that new potatoes are less digestible than mature ones reflects the period's confident dietetic theorising; the modern explanation is that immature tubers have more sugar, less fully developed starch, and a lower proportion of dry matter.