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Potatoes in Their Jackets
Wash well and dry. Put in a hot oven and cook from fifty to sixty minutes. When soft break skin in one place and serve at once.
A bare-bones baked potato, written when "hot oven" was all the direction a cook needed. The only real skill here is judging doneness and venting the steam.
- Oven temperatureA "hot oven" in books of this period usually means somewhere in the range of 400 to 450F. At that heat a medium russet takes 50 to 60 minutes as written; very large potatoes may need longer.
- Choose a mealy potatoRussets and other high-starch varieties give the dry, fluffy interior the recipe assumes. Waxy red or new potatoes bake to a dense, damp crumb.
- Dry the skin properlyThe instruction to wash and dry is not filler. Surface water steams the skin soft instead of letting it crisp, and a wet potato takes longer to come up to temperature.
- Pierce before bakingPrick each potato two or three times with a fork so steam escapes during cooking. Whole unpierced potatoes occasionally split in the oven.
- No foil, no oil neededWrapping in foil traps moisture and gives you a steamed potato. If you want a glossier, more tender skin, rub lightly with fat and salt; leave it bare for the crispest result.
- Testing donenessSqueeze with a cloth or push in a thin skewer: it should meet no resistance at the center. Internal temperature of about 205F to 210F gives the fully fluffy texture.
- Why break the skin at onceVenting the skin the moment the potato leaves the oven lets the trapped steam out; a potato left whole steams itself and the interior turns damp and dense.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; one potato per person is the usual serving.
Baking potatoes in their skins is a very old method in European kitchens, and it survived into printed cookbooks in part because it needed no equipment beyond an oven with space to spare. Mrs. Wilson's book dates from around 1920, when households were cooking on coal or gas ranges that generally lacked thermometers, so "a hot oven" and the touch test stood in for numbers. The phrase "in their jackets" is long-established British kitchen usage for cooking a potato with the skin left on, and the deliberate instruction to break the skin and serve immediately suggests that cooks of the period understood the steam problem, even without the vocabulary of moisture and starch we would use now.