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Franconia Potatoes
Three-quarters of an hour before roast is finished, place quartered, pared potatoes about it, and brown with roast. Season.
A one-line instruction that assumes a roast already in the oven and a cook standing by. The whole method is contact with hot fat and the roast's own drippings, so the details of size and turning are what decide whether they brown or steam.
- The hinge: parboil if your oven is lowMost modern roasts are cooked around 325-350F, and at that temperature bare quartered potatoes may not colour and cook through in the three-quarters of an hour the recipe allows. Eight to ten minutes in boiling salted water first, drained dry, will usually let the recipe's timing stand.
- Cut sizeThe recipe does not say what size potato it has in mind. Aim for pieces around 1.5 to 2 inches; smaller pieces brown before the roast is done and larger ones may still be firm at the centre.
- Fat in the panA modern trimmed roast throws off far less fat than the joints this book had in mind. If the pan looks dry, add two or three tablespoons of the drippings, beef fat or oil and roll the potatoes in it before they go in.
- ArrangementSet them in a single layer with space between, resting directly on the pan rather than propped against the meat. Crowded potatoes release steam and go pale and soft.
- TurningTurn them once at the halfway point so both cut faces meet the hot pan. The undersides brown first and the tops will stay dull if left alone.
- SeasonThe original leaves this open: salt and pepper are what is meant. Cooks differ on whether to salt at the start or near the end, since salt draws moisture to the surface.
- If the roast restsA roast will need some resting time before carving, and potatoes will soften in a covered pan. Lift them onto a shallow tray and hold them in the turned-off oven, or give them a few minutes in a hot oven while the roast rests.
- YieldReckon one medium potato per person as a side dish, two if the roast is small and there is no other starch on the menu.
Franconia potatoes are simply potatoes roasted in the meat pan, and the name is one of the small mysteries of American cookery writing. The origin is not established; it has been linked to Franconia, though no particular German dish accounts for the usage. The term appears in English-language cookbooks from the later nineteenth century, and Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book helped keep it current, after which it turns up in a good many American household manuals under that heading. Its appearance here, compressed to a single sentence, shows how far the method was taken as assumed knowledge: the writer needed only to name it and give the timing, confident that the cook already knew what a pan of browning potatoes looked like. The economy is part of the appeal in a period when the oven was lit for the roast and neither the heat nor the drippings were to be wasted.