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New Jersey New Potatoes
Scrape small new potatoes, cook till tender in boiling salted water. Drain, pour into serving dish. Pour over them 3 tablespoons melted butter, dredge with paprika, sprinkle with minced parsley and serve very hot.
A plain buttered-potato treatment that lives or dies on the potatoes themselves. Two details in the original are worth pinning down: what "scrape" means, and how salty the water should be.
- Scraping, not peelingTrue new potatoes have a thin, feathery skin that rubs off under running water with a stiff brush or the back of a paring knife. If the skin resists scraping, the potatoes are not new and are better left unpeeled.
- Salting the waterThe original assumes the cook knows the ratio. About 1 tablespoon salt per quart of water is a usual guide; the potatoes take up some seasoning as they cook, which is harder to make up for once they are dressed.
- TimingSmall potatoes of roughly equal size need 12 to 18 minutes at a bare boil. Test with a skewer rather than a fork, which splits the skins and lets water in.
- Dry them before butteringAfter draining, return the potatoes to the empty hot pan for a minute so the surface steam evaporates. Butter poured over wet potatoes slides off and pools.
- PaprikaIn an American book of this period paprika generally means a mild sweet paprika, used largely for color. Buy it fresh; paprika more than a year old tastes of dust and turns brick-brown.
- QuantityThe original gives no weight of potatoes and no yield; three tablespoons of butter is about enough to dress a couple of pounds.
- Serve very hotThe instruction is not filler. Warm the serving dish, and dress the potatoes at the last moment, since butter congeals on cooling potatoes quickly and dulls the paprika.