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Potatoes Roasted with Meat
The potatoes should not be small, else they will bake dry and crusty. Pare the potatoes, boil them fifteen minutes, and drain well. Then place them in the baking-pan with the roast, and cook for forty-five minutes, turning them often and basting with the gravy from the roast. Serve them arranged about the meat. Some cooks do not parboil the potatoes before putting them in the pan, but the result is not so successful, especially when beef is roasting, which requires so much less time for cooking than either veal, pork or mutton.
A method rather than a formula: potatoes finished in the roasting pan, parboiled first so they cook through in the time a roast has left. Everything hinges on the parboil and on the fat in the pan.
- The parboil is the pointFifteen minutes in boiling water, then drained well, is what lets the outsides roughen and crisp. The original warns only that skipping it gives a result "not so successful," particularly with a short-cooking beef roast.
- Dry them properlyAfter draining, leave them in the hot empty pan or colander for a minute or two so the surface steam escapes. A quick shake to scuff the edges gives more surface to brown.
- Choose the right potato"Not small" means large potatoes, kept whole as the original has them (pared, boiled, then roasted). A floury or all-purpose potato — russet, Maris Piper, King Edward — behaves as described; waxy new potatoes stay dense and will not fluff.
- Oven temperatureThe book assumes the potatoes ride along with whatever the roast needs. Below about 375F they will soften without colouring; if your roast is going at 325F, give the potatoes a separate pan at 425F for the last 45 minutes.
- Basting with pan gravyBasting potatoes with the roast's juices makes them savoury but keeps them soft, since the liquid stops the surface drying. Baste for flavour early and let them sit dry in the fat for the final 15 minutes to crisp.
- CrowdingForty-five minutes only works if the potatoes lie in a single layer with space between them and are turned two or three times. Piled around a roast in a small pan they steam instead of roasting; use a second pan with a few spoonfuls of the drippings.
- Why beef is singled outThe original notes that beef requires far less cooking time than veal, pork or mutton, which were given longer roasting. With beef there is less oven time to cook a raw potato through — hence the insistence on parboiling.
- QuantityNo yield is given. Reckon one large potato per person, which is about 2 lb for four.
Roasting potatoes in the dripping beneath or beside a joint is older than the oven ranges these instructions assume: in open-hearth cooking the meat turned on a spit and the pan below caught the fat, which was too good to waste. By the time The Butterick Cook Book appeared in 1911, the closed cast-iron range had moved the whole operation inside a single pan, and the American Sunday roast with browned potatoes around it was, by most accounts, a well-established domestic form. The passage is characteristic of the book's tone: it engages with rival practice ("some cooks do not parboil") and explains the reasoning, which is often said to be how household manuals of the period trained young cooks. The parboil-then-roast sequence remains standard advice for crisp roast potatoes over a century later.