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Boiled Potatoes
Select potatoes of uniform size. Wash, pare, and drop at once in cold water to prevent discoloration; soak onehalf hour in the fall, and one to two hours in winter and spring. Cook in boiling salted water until soft, which is easily determined by piercing with a skewer. For seven potatoes allow one tablespoon salt, and boiling water to cover. Drain from water, and keep uncovered in warm place until serving time. Avoid sending to table in a covered vegetable dish. In boiling large potatoes, it often happens that outside is soft, while centre is underdone. To finish cooking without potatoes breaking apart, add one pint cold water, which drives heat to centre, thus accomplishing the cooking.
A plain method that still works, though two of its instructions were written for potatoes stored in a root cellar rather than bought in a bag.
- The soak is optional nowFarmer's half-hour to two-hour soak was meant for potatoes that had spent months in storage and had gone slightly sweet and dark at the cut surface. A modern potato needs only to sit in cold water while you finish paring the rest, to keep the flesh from browning.
- Start in cold water insteadDropping pared potatoes into already boiling water cooks the outside well ahead of the centre, which is the exact problem the recipe spends its last sentence solving. Bring them up from cold and the whole potato heats at a similar rate.
- The pint of cold waterAdding cold water takes the pan off the boil, which may keep the outer layer from disintegrating while the centre finishes. The recipe's explanation, that the cold water 'drives heat to centre', is not what is happening. Try it if the outside is collapsing before a skewer will pass through the middle.
- SaltThe recipe gives one tablespoon of salt for seven potatoes but only says 'boiling water to cover', so the actual concentration cannot be pinned down. Salt more aggressively if the potatoes are going to the table plain.
- TestingA skewer or thin knife should meet no resistance at the centre. Expect 15-20 minutes for quartered potatoes, 25-40 for whole medium ones, depending on size and variety.
- Uncovered, and whyThe instruction to keep them uncovered and out of a lidded vegetable dish is sound: trapped steam condenses on the potatoes and turns them sodden. Drain, return to the dry hot pan for a minute to let the surface moisture flash off, then hold uncovered in a warm place.
- VarietyThe book assumes a general-purpose potato. A floury russet will fall apart at the edges if held long; a waxy red or yellow potato holds its shape and suits this treatment better.
- YieldSeven medium potatoes serve about six as a side dish.
Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book treats the boiled potato as a piece of basic technique rather than a dish, which is why the entry reads like a set of corrections to things cooks were doing wrong. The seasonal soaking times are the clearest sign of its date: potatoes were commonly bought in quantity in autumn and eaten down through winter and spring, so a potato in April could be a very different vegetable from one in October, sweeter, softer and quicker to discolour when cut. The warning against the covered vegetable dish belongs to the same world of formal service, where food went to the table under a lid and arrived steamed limp. Farmer's habit of giving a proportion, one tablespoon of salt to seven potatoes, rather than telling the cook to salt to taste, is the whole argument of her book in miniature: cooking treated as measurable and teachable rather than handed down.