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Baked Potatoes
Wash them well, place them in a bakingpan, and bake in a quick oven for from forty-five minutes to one hour. Shake the pan at the end of twenty minutes to turn the potatoes. Do not pierce them with a fork, but squeeze them with the hands to see if they are done. When soft, crack in one place and serve.
A plain baked potato, but the instructions carry a few assumptions worth spelling out.
- "Quick oven"Period usage generally means a hot oven, roughly 400-450F on a modern dial, though the book gives no figure. At that heat a large potato will take something close to the recipe's forty-five minutes to one hour.
- Choose a mealy potatoThe recipe does not specify a variety, but the method suits a starchy one. Floury varieties go fluffy; waxy red or new potatoes stay dense.
- Why not to pierceThe recipe forbids forking but does not say why; the usual explanation is that punctures let steam escape. Squeezing, as instructed, tells you the same thing, and a towel or cloth protects the hand.
- Cracking to serveSplitting the skin as the potato leaves the oven vents trapped steam, which is generally held to keep the interior dry and light.
- Dry the skinsAfter washing, dry the potatoes thoroughly before they go in the pan. Surface water steams the skin soft instead of crisping it.
- Shaking the panTurning at twenty minutes evens out the browning in a hot spot-prone oven; on a modern rack it matters less, though it still keeps the underside from flattening.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity; scale to the number of eaters.
The Butterick Publishing Company was a dressmaking-pattern firm that expanded into household manuals around the turn of the twentieth century, and its cook book reflects the same instinct as its patterns: a standard method, clearly stated, for a reader who may never have been taught. Baked potatoes had long been a staple of Anglo-American cooking, but they were transformed by the arrival of the reliable cast-iron cookstove and later the gas range, which made a sustained hot oven something an ordinary household could produce at will rather than a byproduct of hearth baking day. Care is taken here over not piercing the skin and over cracking the potato at the moment of serving, both of which work toward lightness and dryness in the flesh.