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Franconia Potatoes
Prepare as for Boiled Potatoes, and parboil ten minutes; drain, and place in pan in which meat is roasting; bake until soft, basting with fat in pan when basting meat. Time required for baking about forty minutes. Sweet potatoes may be prepared in the same way.
A method rather than a formula: potatoes finished in the roasting pan alongside the meat. The only real variables are the parboil and the basting.
- The hinge is the parboilTen minutes in boiling salted water sets the surface starch, and the drained potatoes should be left to steam dry for a minute or two before they go into the fat. Wet potatoes will steam rather than brown.
- "Prepare as for Boiled Potatoes"In Farmer's book that means washed and pared, potatoes of uniform size. If you cut large ones, keep the pieces even so they cook through in the forty minutes given.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none, assuming whatever heat the roast is taking. At a moderate roasting heat forty minutes is about right for parboiled pieces; in a hotter oven they will be done sooner, so check early.
- Fat in the panModern roasts, especially trimmed beef and pork loin, throw far less fat than a 1900 joint. Add two or three tablespoons of drippings, butter or oil to the pan or the potatoes will stick and scorch.
- Room in the panThey need a single layer with space between them. Crowded around a roast in a small pan they will braise in the juices instead of crisping; a second shallow pan on the same rack is more reliable.
- BastingTurn as well as baste, so each cut face gets time against the hot metal. Twice during the forty minutes is enough.
- Sweet potatoesThey contain more sugar and will color much faster. Give them the same parboil but check at twenty-five minutes.
- YieldReckon one medium potato, about 6 oz, per person, or a little more if they are the only starch on the plate.
The name is often linked to Franconia, in New Hampshire's White Mountains, a summer resort district familiar to Boston households by the late nineteenth century, though the derivation is traditional rather than documented and a German Franconia has also been proposed; American cookbooks of the period attach the label to potatoes browned in the roasting pan rather than boiled or baked separately. Fannie Farmer's inclusion of it suits the economy of a coal or wood range, where the meat and its accompaniments shared one oven and one pan, and the drippings did double duty as cooking fat and sauce. The technique itself is older than the name and wider than New England: the same principle produces English roast potatoes and the potatoes cooked under a French roast. What is characteristic of Farmer is the instruction to parboil first, a small piece of discipline that turns an improvisation into a repeatable method.