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New Potatoes
Wash, scrape, boil ten minutes, turn off water, and add enough more, boiling hot, to cover, also add a little salt; cook a few moments, drain, and set again on stove, add butter, salt, and pepper and a little thickening made of two table-spoons flour in about a pint of milk (a few small ones may be left in the kettle, and broken, not mashed with the potato-masher), put on the cover, and, when the milk has boiled, pour over potatoes and serve. Or, when cooked and drained, put in a skillet with hot drippings, cover, and shake till a nice brown.
Two finishes for early-summer potatoes: a light milk gravy, or a shake-browning in hot fat. The instructions are compressed, and the sequence of boilings needs unpacking.
- The two-water boilThe first ten minutes of water is poured off and replaced with fresh boiling water. Some cooks of the period did this to get rid of the starchy first water; skipping it does no harm, though using boiling rather than cold water for the second filling keeps the cooking from stalling.
- Scrape, don't peelNew potatoes have skins thin enough to rub off under running water with a cloth or the back of a knife. Look for waxy, small potatoes about 1 to 1.5 inches across; a modern bag of new or baby potatoes is the right thing.
- Total cooking timeTen minutes plus "a few moments" is optimistic for anything but the smallest potatoes. Test with a skewer at 15 to 20 minutes total; waxy potatoes hold their shape and will not fall apart if you go slightly over.
- The thickeningTwo tablespoons flour to a pint (2 cups) of milk gives a thin pouring sauce, not a gravy. Whisk the flour into cold milk before heating or it will lump, and let it boil a full minute to cook out the raw flour taste.
- The broken potatoesThe parenthesis is optional: a few of the small ones may be left in the kettle and broken, not mashed, so they release starch and give the sauce body. Overwork them and you get wallpaper paste.
- "Hot drippings"Whatever rendered fat was to hand, most likely bacon fat or beef drippings. Any fat with a decent smoke point works; the potatoes should be well drained and dry, and the pan properly hot, or they steam instead of browning. Shake rather than stir to keep them whole.
- YieldNone is given. As a rough guide, a pint of milk sauce would suit something like 2 lb of potatoes, serving four to six as a side.
The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the family of late-nineteenth-century American compilations whose vegetable entries often read as short technical notes rather than fixed formulas — this entry, at least, runs two alternatives together with no yield given. New potatoes — freshly lifted tubers whose skins have not yet set — were strictly seasonal before cold storage and long-distance shipping, appearing for a few weeks in late spring and early summer and prized because they needed nothing but boiling. The milk-and-flour finish here is the same thin white sauce that ran through American home cooking of the period under a dozen names, used on creamed onions, creamed peas and dried beef alike; the trick of crushing a few potatoes into it to thicken and cloud the liquid is written down explicitly here, and it survives in the creamed new potatoes still made in the South and Midwest.