Home › Vegetables › Baked Potatoes
Baked Potatoes
Wash and scrub six potatoes of uniform size. Place in dripping pan, and bake in hot oven forty-five minutes to one hour, turning when half done. Pierce with skewer, and serve immediately.
A bare-bones method that still works, though a few of its assumptions belong to a coal or early gas range.
- "Hot oven"Conventionally read as somewhere around 400-450F. At that heat a medium russet takes roughly 45 minutes to an hour, which is broadly consistent with the original timing.
- Dripping panThe shallow roasting pan that sat under a joint. Any rimmed sheet pan does the job; a rack or bare pan both work, since the point is only to catch dirt and let air circulate.
- Turning halfwayThis mattered more in a range with uneven heat from one wall. In a modern oven it is still worth a turn so the underside does not flatten and steam against the metal.
- The skewer is the hingeThe skewer -- most likely a doneness test, though piercing also lets trapped steam escape, which helps the interior stay mealy rather than turning soggy as it sits. The instruction to serve immediately points the same way.
- Uniform sizeNot fussiness. Mixed sizes in one pan means some potatoes are still hard at the center while others have collapsed.
- VarietyA high-starch potato -- russet or Idaho -- gives the dry, fluffy interior this method assumes. Waxy red or new potatoes will bake, but stay firm and damp inside.
- No foil, no oilThe recipe calls for neither, and it is right. Foil traps steam and softens the skin; the dry heat here is what crisps it.
- YieldSix potatoes; the recipe does not say how many it serves. Seasoning is not mentioned at all, presumably left to the table.
Baking is the oldest and least equipment-dependent way to cook a potato, and in a wood- or coal-fired range it cost little extra: the potatoes could go in beside whatever else was roasting. Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and its confectionery chapters are the best remembered part of it; like many household manuals of the period it also aimed at completeness, which meant printing the plainest vegetable instructions alongside the elaborate ones. The brevity here is striking: the reader is reminded of just three things -- uniform size, a turn partway through, and the skewer.