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Skins
Prepare a saucepan of boiling water with steamer attached. Scrub the potatoes well. Put them into the steamer and cook them about one-half hour or until potatoes are soft when pierced with a, fork. Remove steamer from the pan.
Shake it until the potatoes are dry, and serve in their skins, or peel, if desired.
If you have no steamer, use a basin, placed in a saucepan containing boiling water. In this case, cook five or six minutes longer.
BAKED POTATOES-No. 1 Scrub potatoes well, dry and place in a baking tin. Bake in a moderate oven from one to two hours, according to size.
Too great heat will cause the potatoes to shrivel.
Potatoes are improved by being steamed for about twenty minutes before baking. Large potatoes are best for baking.
BAKED POTATOES-No. 2 Steam potatoes until the skins peel off easily. Roughen the surface with a fork and sprinkle with a little flour and salt.
Place potatoes in a pan with two or three tablespoon of dripping. Baste often and cook until potatoes are brown and tender.
Three plain potato methods, written before anyone owned a thermometer or a foil-wrapped russet. The headnote "Skins" belongs to the first method: potatoes steamed whole and served in their jackets.
- Moderate ovenFor the baked potatoes, read "moderate" as roughly 350-375F. The warning about "too great heat" is the recipe's own: excessive heat can dry and pucker the skin before the centre is done.
- One to two hours is generousA medium potato at 350F is done in 50-60 minutes; only very large baking potatoes need to approach two hours. Test with a skewer rather than the clock — the centre should offer no resistance at all.
- The pre-steam is worth doingTwenty minutes of steam before baking, or steaming until the skin slips, shortens the time needed in the oven. It works on the same principle as parboiling roast potatoes.
- Shaking the steamer dryThe recipe has you lift the steamer off the pan and shake it until the potatoes are dry. Driving off the surface water helps keep the flesh mealy rather than sodden.
- Basin in a saucepanThe improvised steamer is a basin set in a pan of boiling water. It heats less efficiently than a proper steamer, which is presumably why the recipe adds five or six minutes.
- DrippingBeef or pork dripping, saved from roasting. Any fat with a high smoke point works — duck fat, lard, or a neutral oil — but dripping is what gives the browned, savoury crust the recipe assumes.
- Variety mattersThe recipe's "large potatoes are best for baking" is about size, not variety. Separately, high-starch potatoes such as russet or Maris Piper bake floury, while waxy potatoes tend to stay dense.
- YieldReckon one large or two medium potatoes per person. The recipe itself gives no yield.
Potatoes served in their skins were a matter of thrift as much as taste — the peel carries some of the mineral content, and paring wastes a measurable share of the tuber. A page like this spells out something as elementary as scrubbing and drying, and offers a fallback for the reader who owns no steamer. The third method, roughening the steamed surface with a fork and dusting it with flour before it goes into hot dripping, is the standard British roast-potato technique applied to whole potatoes in their jackets; the scratched, floured surface gives the fat more area to crisp.