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Boiled Potatoes
Select a dozen medium-sized potatoes and wash them well, peel off a piece of skin half an inch wide around each potato to insure mealiness, and place them in a saucepan, cover with cold water, adding half a handful of salt; put on the lid and cook for thirty minutes, then drain and lay them on a napkin on a hot hish, and serve.
A plain boiled potato from a hotel kitchen, where the point of the exercise was mealiness and dryness rather than speed. Two details carry the whole recipe: the stripe of peel removed from each potato, and the napkin at the end.
- The band of skinThe recipe says the stripe of peel is "to insure mealiness"; the usual explanation is that the break in the jacket lets steam escape and the flesh swell, so the potato does not burst or turn waterlogged. Worth doing.
- Choose a mealy varietyThe technique only pays off with a high-starch potato — russet or a floury white. Waxy red or new potatoes will hold together but never turn mealy, whatever you do to the skin.
- "Half a handful of salt"Roughly 2 tablespoons for a large pan of water. That reads as a lot, but most of it goes down the drain, and with the skins on little of it reaches the flesh.
- Thirty minutes is an outside figureMedium potatoes started in cold water are usually done at 20 to 25 minutes. Test with a thin knife or skewer at 18 minutes; a potato boiled past done sloughs its outside into the water and the mealiness is lost.
- Drain and dryAfter draining, return them to the empty hot pan off the heat for a minute or two so surface moisture flashes off. The napkin on the hot dish is doing the same job — absorbing steam so the potatoes do not sit in their own wet.
- "Hot hish"A typesetting slip for "hot dish." Warm the serving dish; boiled potatoes lose heat faster than almost anything else on the table.
- YieldA dozen medium potatoes serves six to eight as a side.
Oscar Tschirky's book runs to well over nine hundred pages and includes a great many entries at this level of plainness, because a hotel kitchen of the 1890s needed its cooks to produce identical, unremarkable boiled potatoes as the standard accompaniment to roasts, grills and boiled fish. The trick of peeling a strip around the circumference is often said to be old kitchen practice rather than an invention of the Waldorf, and it is a reminder that potatoes were frequently boiled in their skins, since the jacket keeps flavor and starch in the potato instead of in the water. The napkin-lined dish appears to belong to the same service tradition — a folded cloth under vegetables, and often draped over them, turns up in nineteenth-century hotel and household books as an accepted way to send anything mealy or fried to the table without it steaming itself soggy.