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Boiled Potatoes
Wash and scrape the skin from the potatoes with a knife made for this purpose. Drop at once into cold water to prevent discoloration. Let them remain in water half an hour. If the potatoes are to be cooked in their skins, wash them well and with a sharp knife cut a narrow band of skin from the center of the potato. Cover well with boiling water and let them boil with a cover on for thirty minutes. When the potatoes have boiled fifteen minutes put in the water 1 tablespoon of salt.
Drain off the water, and let the potatoes stand in a warm place that the steam may escape. Do not serve in a covered dish, as condensed steam causes the potatoes to become soggy.
A plain method with two details worth keeping and one worth reversing. Nothing here needs conversion; the interest is in the technique.
- The hinge: dry them off the heatDraining and letting the potatoes stand uncovered in a warm pan until the surface steam has gone is what separates a floury boiled potato from a wet one. Thirty seconds back over low heat, pan shaken, does the same job faster.
- Salt from the start, not at fifteen minutesThe instruction to add a tablespoon of salt halfway through may reflect a range slow to recover a boil, though the recipe gives no reason for the timing. Salt the water at the beginning — a scant tablespoon per 2 quarts — so the seasoning penetrates evenly.
- Start peeled potatoes in cold waterCovering with boiling water, as written, cooks the outside before the centre catches up and the edges break up. For peeled potatoes, cover with cold salted water and bring to a boil; potatoes in their skins tolerate the boiling-water start.
- Thirty minutes is for large whole potatoesA medium potato cut in halves is done in 15–20 minutes, and a whole large russet may want 35–40. Test with a thin skewer at the centre rather than the clock.
- The band of skinCutting a narrow strip of peel from the middle of a jacket potato vents steam and keeps the skin from bursting. A few deep knife scores around the equator achieve the same and are easier to do neatly.
- The half-hour soakStanding peeled potatoes in cold water prevents the grey-brown discolouration from enzymatic browning. Ten minutes is enough if you are cooking straight away; a soak this long would suit prep done well ahead of dinner, and it does leach a little starch.
- "A knife made for this purpose"This is the old scraping or paring knife, superseded by the swivel peeler. Very new potatoes still scrape better than they peel.
- ServingNo yield is given. Reckon 6–8 oz of potato per person as a side, and send them to the table in an open dish, as the recipe insists — a lidded tureen returns condensation to the surface and softens the skins.
Meatless Cookery belongs to a cluster of American cookbooks concerned with cooking without meat. Treating boiled potatoes as a dish able to stand at the centre of a meal says less about the potato's nutritional profile — it is mostly starch, and a poor stand-in for a chop — than about how such books were organised: their categories held whatever could carry the centre of a plate when meat was absent. The insistence on letting the steam escape and never covering the dish is a standing preoccupation of period cookery writing, which returned again and again to the difference between a dry, mealy potato and a sodden one.