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Baked Potatoes
Select smooth, medium-sized potatoes. Wash, using a vegetable brush, and place in dripping-pan. Bake in hot oven forty minutes or until soft, remove from oven, and serve at once. If allowed to stand, unless the skin is ruptured for escape of steam, they become soggy. Properly baked potatoes are more easily digested than potatoes cooked in any other way, as some of the starch is changed to dextrin by the intense heat. They are better cooked in boiling water than baked in a slow oven.
Farmer's instructions still hold up; only the oven language and a few of her assumptions need translating.
- "Hot oven"Read that as 425-450F. Forty minutes is realistic for a medium russet at that heat; a large one wants 50-60 minutes. The potato is done when a skewer meets no resistance at the center, around 205-210F internally.
- Which potatoFarmer specifies only "smooth, medium-sized" and says nothing about type. Mealy, high-starch varieties bake to the dry, fluffy interior she is after; waxy red or new potatoes stay dense and gummy.
- The hinge: vent the steamHer warning about ruptured skin is the whole point of the recipe. Cut a slit or press the potato open the moment it leaves the oven. Trapped steam condenses inside and turns the flesh sodden within a few minutes.
- Dripping-panA shallow rimmed roasting pan. Bare oven racks work just as well; the pan is there to catch drips, not to conduct heat.
- Piercing before bakingFarmer does not mention it, but pricking each potato two or three times with a fork before it goes in lets steam escape throughout the bake and prevents the occasional burst.
- Skip the foilFoil steams the potato rather than baking it, which produces exactly the soggy result she is warning against. Bake dry and uncovered; oiling and salting the skin is optional and modern.
- The dextrin claimDry heat does convert some surface starch to dextrins, though the browning of the skin owes at least as much to Maillard reactions. The digestibility argument attached to it belongs to period nutrition writing rather than to current science.
- YieldOne medium potato per person as a side, two if it is the center of the plate.
Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896) gave the potato many entries, and the closing lines here show why: she was teaching cookery as applied chemistry at a school founded to train teachers of cookery, so even a baked potato came with a rationale about starch and digestion. The reasoning reflects the era's enthusiasm for the new science of nutrition. Her final remark, that potatoes are better boiled than baked in a slow oven, may reflect the coal and wood ranges most readers still used, where oven heat was uneven and hard to hold high; a cook who could not get a hot oven was better off with a pot on the stovetop.