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Browned Potatoes
Either sweet or white potatoes may be browned. Boil and peel them, cutting them in halves if they are very large. Put them in a baking pan; baste with savory drippings or butter and season with salt.
Cook in a hot oven until brown.
The potatoes may be browned in a frying pan over the fire if the oven is not hot. The oven, however, is to be preferred. If the potatoes are to be served with a roast they may be browned with the meat. They should, however, never be put into the pan raw, as they are sure to turn dark and ugly if not boiled first.
A parboil-then-roast method that predates the modern craze for it by a century. The instruction that matters is the last one: the potatoes go into the fat already cooked through.
- Hot ovenIn books of this period a hot oven generally meant somewhere in the region of 400-450F. At that sort of heat halved boiled potatoes will take roughly half an hour, turned once or twice.
- Boil first, alwaysFryer is emphatic on this point. Raw potatoes set in fat around a roast cook slowly and unevenly, and discolour before they crisp, which is presumably the "dark and ugly" result she warns of. Boil until a knife goes in with slight resistance, then drain and let the steam dry off.
- Savory drippingsFat saved from earlier roasts, typically beef or pork. Any high-smoke-point fat works; the recipe itself offers butter as the alternative, though butter alone will darken at high oven heat.
- Rough the surfacesNot in the original: shaking the drained potatoes in the pot to scuff the outsides gives markedly more crust.
- Sweet potatoes behave differentlyTheir sugars caramelise and can scorch before the exterior firms. Watch them from about 20 minutes and expect a softer, stickier surface rather than a crisp shell.
- Browning with the roastThis works only if the roasting pan is not crowded and there is rendered fat to spare. Potatoes packed against the meat steam instead of browning, and a moderate roasting oven will not crisp them the way the hot oven she prefers does.
- Skillet versionHer fallback: a heavy pan, hot fat, and patience. Turn only when a crust has formed, or the halves break up.
- QuantityNo yield is given. Reckon a medium potato per person as a side, two if the dish is standing in for bread.
Browned potatoes appear in the American roast dinner repertoire of the nineteenth century, though how standard a fixture they were is not easily documented. Fryer's insistence on boiling first has often been explained by the limitations of the range ovens of the period, which are said to have run unevenly, but the reason for the rule is not stated in the recipe itself. The recipe also assumes something most modern cooks no longer keep, a jar of savory drippings from previous roasts, which helps explain why a side dish like this cost almost nothing. Mrs. Fryer's loose-leaf format was aimed at cooks who wanted method rather than ceremony, and the tone here is characteristic: two techniques, a stated preference between them, and one firm warning about the mistake that ruins the dish.