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Baked Potatoes (Wash the potatoes perfectly)
Wash the potatoes perfectly clean and let them drain; put them in an old baking pan in a hot oven and bake until soft. Potatoes of medium size will take about forty minutes. Baked potatoes should be served as soon as they are done, but if they must stand for any time the skins should be broken so that the moisture may escape.
A plain method that still holds up; the only guidance it withholds is the actual oven temperature and what "an old baking pan" is for.
- Hot ovenPeriod cookbooks generally put a "hot" oven somewhere around 400-450F, though usage varies from book to book. At the upper end of that range medium russets often want 45-60 minutes rather than forty; the forty-minute figure suits a small potato or a very hot oven.
- The old panThe recipe does not say why, but the likely reason is practical rather than sentimental: potatoes can leak and scorch, so a battered pan was no loss. A rimmed sheet pan lined with foil does the same duty, or set them straight on the rack with a pan beneath.
- Drain, do not dry-rubNo oil or salt -- the recipe washes and drains and nothing more, which gives a drier, papery skin than the modern oiled-and-salted version.
- Doneness"Until soft" means a skewer or thin knife slides to the centre with no resistance, around 205-210F internally. Underbaked potato stays waxy and gluey at the core no matter how long it then sits.
- Breaking the skinsThis is the point worth keeping. A finished potato left whole traps steam and turns sodden; a slit cut lengthwise the moment it leaves the oven vents it and keeps the flesh floury. Piercing before baking is a different matter and is not needed for thin-skinned potatoes.
- VarietyA dry, starchy potato is what this method wants -- russet or another baking type. Waxy new potatoes will cook through but stay dense.
- YieldOne medium potato per person as a side dish, two if they are small or the potato is doing most of the work at the meal.
Baked potatoes appear in cookbooks of this period as a matter of course rather than as a dish requiring persuasion, which is itself telling: the potato had by then shed its long reputation as fodder and become the default American starch, cheap enough to be assumed on any table. The appeal of baking was economy of labour -- no peeling, no pot to watch, no water to boil off -- and it suited the cast-iron ranges and later gas ovens that were already heated for the rest of the meal. The terse instructions here are of a piece with that: enough to settle the timing and the one detail a cook might get wrong, and nothing more.