Important: Safety Warning
This page states that certain wild plants are safe to eat. Its identifications and edibility claims are more than a century old and in some cases simply wrong, and deadly look-alikes exist for many edible species. Never eat a wild plant on the strength of this text.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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"B'iled Taters''
Our American Savarin, Thomas J. Murrey, caterer to New York's original Astor House in the eighteen seventies and author of many recipes and original cookbooks that have been too long neglected, gives the following report of an early hunting trip in Minnesota: "To boil a potato properly is very naturally supposed to be a very easy matter, but how seldom do we meet with one boiled to a proper turn? In 1873, while out hunting in northwestern Minnesota, I stopped at an old log-cabin for dinner. The proprietor of the hostelry was an old Down- East Yankee, who, suffering from a lung complaint, had taken his family out West, and had pre-empted one hundred and sixty acres, there to remain the rest of his days. I had the good fortune of having a well-filled pocket-pistol of brandy with me (to be used for medicinal purposes only), which I soon converted into milk-punch while his wife was preparing dinner. He was delighted with it, and told me that it was the first drop of spirits he had seen or tasted for several years (and I believed him, from the manner in which that punch disappeared). This set him to telling me what a splendid cook his wife was, and that she could beat 'all tarnation a'biling taters.' I left him immediately and offered my services to madam as second cook, my object being to learn her trick of boiling potatoes. At last dinner was ready, the cloth spread, and while the judge (as he was called) set the table I looked for a garden (?) to get a salad. Not finding the cultivated article, I had to resort to the field, and obtained a few edible weeds, washed and dried them, and prepared them for dinner. "Our Bill of Fare Vegetable Soup Smoked Shad with Drawn Butter Roast Rump of Salted Beef Boiled Potatoes Parsnip Fritters Weed Salad Cold Johnnycake Homemade Cheese Acorn Coffee "My long tramp over the prairie, hunting prairie-chickens, may possibly have had something to do with my ferocious appetite, but I do not remember an occasion when I enjoyed myself so much at table or ate so heartily. The dinner was a success, and the potatoes surpassed all expectations. I am not much of a potato-eater, but on this occasion I surprised myself by asking for a potato the third time. "Her recipe for boiling potatoes was very simple. She washed them well and peeled off a strip about a quarter of an inch wide lengthwise round each potato, placed them in an old iron pot, covered them with fresh rain-water (cold), and added a teaspoonful of salt. She allowed them to boil fifteen minutes, and then poured out a quart of the hot water and added a quart dipperful of cold water. When the edge of the peel began to curl up, she pronounced them done, and removed them from the pot, covered the bottom of a baking-tin with them, placed them in the oven with a towel over them for fifteen minutes, with the oven-door open. They were splendid. "The roast rump of salt beef was a new dish to me, but it was very good. It had stood in water twenty-four hours to extract the salt from it. It was a little dry and a trifle too well done. "My salad was composed of a few dandelions that had grown in a shady spot, a few inch dock-leaves, the tip-ends of the milkweed, and a few wild chives, with bacon dressing; but I had no vinegar. As a substitute I gathered a handful of sheep sorrel, chopped it up fine, and sprinkled it over the salad. "On my departure the judge addressed me as Mr. Weedeater, and requested me to make his cabin my home whenever I was in Minnesota." If you try Tom Murrey's potatoes in camp, just heap them in the center of whatever board you are using to eat on and keep them in place with what the Irish call "a potato ring"-any sizable wooden or metal ring, which does away with the necessity for a plate or platter. You might also go in for another old Irish custom called:
Underneath the anecdote is a genuine and rather good method: boil, shock with cold water, then dry the potatoes off in a low oven under a cloth. A few of the particulars need translating for a modern stove or a camp fire.
- The hinge: dry them after boilingThe whole point of the method is the fifteen minutes in the oven under a towel with the door open, which drives off surface moisture and leaves the flesh floury rather than waterlogged. In camp, set the drained pot back beside the fire off direct heat with a cloth over the top and shake it once or twice.
- The peeled stripRemoving a quarter-inch band of skin lengthwise round each potato gives the flesh somewhere to swell and turns the remaining peel into a doneness gauge — when the cut edge curls back, the potato is cooked through. It works, but only with whole unpeeled potatoes of roughly equal size.
- Fifteen minutes is shortFifteen minutes is only the first stage — the cold water goes in after it and cooking continues until the peel curls, so the total is longer than the number suggests. Whole medium potatoes in their skins generally want 20 to 30 minutes at a simmer, longer for anything much over six ounces. Treat the curling peel and a skewer sliding in without resistance as the test rather than the clock.
- Quart dipperfulA dipper was a long-handled cup, and here it simply means a quart of cold water poured in to replace a quart of the boiling water — enough to drop the pot off the boil so the outsides stop breaking up while the centres finish. Any measure close to a quart does the job.
- Fresh rain-waterRain-water was prized as soft water in hard-water country. Ordinary tap water is fine; do not collect rainwater for cooking now.
- Oven for the drying stageThe oven with its door left open was simply a warm, draughty box of no fixed temperature; the aim is to dry the surface, not to cook further. Use the lowest setting your oven has, with the door ajar.
- The weed salad is not a recipe to followMurrey's dandelion, dock, milkweed tips and sheep sorrel belong to the story, not to your dinner. Raw milkweed shoots contain cardenolides and are easily confused with dogbane, sheep sorrel carries a heavy oxalic acid load, and no wild plant should be eaten on the authority of a century-old page.
- Acorn coffee and the pocket-pistolAcorn coffee was a frontier substitute made from roasted acorns and appears here as a marker of a cabin with no store within reach. A pocket-pistol was a flat spirit flask; milk punch of the period was spirits with milk and sugar, often nutmeg, though the text says only that he turned his brandy into it.
- Yield and the potato ringReckon one large or two medium potatoes a head. The potato ring the closing note describes is a hoop set on the bare table to hold a heap of hot potatoes — serviceable in camp, and the reason plates were unnecessary.