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Boiled Potatoes
Potatoes may be boiled with skins on, or may be pared and boiled in salted water. Old potatoes should be soaked in cold water at least an hour. Potatoes should be boiled gently and not furiously.
When tender, drain thoroughly, dry on back of range. Shake saucepan, cover with coarse towel until ready to serve.
Serve in open vegetable dish, never in a closed one.
A method rather than a formula, and the instructions that matter are the ones about what happens after the water is poured off.
- The hinge: dry themDraining and then letting the potatoes steam dry over low heat is what separates a floury potato from a soggy one. Thirty seconds to a minute on the burner at its lowest setting, with the pan uncovered, drives off the surface water.
- "Back of range"A coal or wood range had a cooler zone at the rear where a pan could sit without cooking further. The modern equivalent is the lowest gas flame or a burner switched off but still hot.
- Why the towel, not the lidA cloth over the pan absorbs steam; a lid returns it as condensation and the potatoes turn wet and heavy. The same logic drives the instruction to serve in an open dish.
- Soaking old potatoesLong-stored potatoes shrivel and their skins toughen; an hour in cold water rehydrates them and draws out some surface starch. Freshly harvested potatoes need none of this.
- Gently, not furiouslyA hard boil batters the outsides to mush before the centres are done. Keep the water at a bare simmer. (The recipe says only that the water be salted; it gives no direction about starting cold or hot.)
- Salt and timingThe recipe gives no quantity of salt and no time. Salt the water to taste; whole medium potatoes generally run 20 to 30 minutes depending on size; test with a thin knife at the centre, not the edge.
- Which potatoThe reference to old, stored potatoes points to a main-crop potato rather than new ones. A starchy potato such as a russet behaves as described; waxy new potatoes will not dry out the same way and do not need to.
- YieldReckon one medium potato per person as a side, two if the rest of the meal is light.
Boiled potatoes needed no recipe in 1907, which is precisely why this entry is all technique and no quantities: the writer assumes the reader has boiled potatoes many times before and is only correcting the two or three habits that ruin them. The insistence on an open serving dish fits a period preference for the mealy, dry potato as the correct one, and a standing reproach to the waterlogged potato of the careless kitchen. Lowney's, published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston as a promotional cookbook built around its chocolate, nonetheless carried a full complement of plain household cookery of this kind, which suggests such books were expected to serve as a general kitchen reference and not merely a catalogue of confections.