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Boiled Potatoes
-THOMPSON.
Old potatoes are better for being peeled and put in cold water an hour before being put over to boil. They should then be put into fresh cold water, when set over the fire. New potatoes should always be put into boiling water, and it is best to prepare them just in time for cooking. Are better steamed than boiled.
A method note rather than a formal recipe: the whole point is the temperature of the water at the start, which differs for old and new potatoes.
- The hingeOld, starchy potatoes go into cold water and come up to a boil with it, so the outside does not blow apart before the centre softens. New potatoes go straight into water already boiling, which sets the waxy flesh and keeps it firm.
- Why the hour's soakThe recipe gives no reason. Long-stored old potatoes tend to sweeten and to darken at the cut surface, and an hour under cold water excludes air and washes off surface starch, which would explain the direction. With modern stock a 15-30 minute soak is plenty, and it is optional.
- Fresh waterThompson is specific that the potatoes go into fresh cold water, so the soaking water is discarded rather than boiled in.
- SaltNo salt is mentioned anywhere. Salt the water generously — about a tablespoon per 4 quarts — or the potatoes will taste flat no matter what you do afterwards.
- TimingThe original gives none. Old potatoes cut to even 2-inch pieces need roughly 15-20 minutes from the boil; small new potatoes 10-15. Test with a thin knife at the centre, not the edge.
- "Better steamed than boiled"The sentence has no stated subject; coming straight after the new-potato direction it probably refers to them, but it may be general advice. A steamer basket over an inch of boiling water for 15-20 minutes gives less waterlogging and better flavour, and the advice still holds.
- Drying offNot in the original, but a direction found in other period cookbooks and still worth doing: drain, return to the dry hot pan off the heat for a minute or two, lid ajar, to let the surface steam escape before dressing with butter.
Instructions this brief were common in nineteenth-century community cookbooks compiled from contributions signed with a surname -- here Thompson. The distinction between "old" and "new" potatoes mattered far more then than now: households bought potatoes in bulk in autumn and ate down the store until the first new crop arrived in summer, so by spring the tubers were sprouting, shrunken and sugary, and directions of this kind -- cold soaking, cold-water starts, changing the water -- address that. Year-round supply and controlled storage have made most of that unnecessary, but the underlying physics the note describes is sound, and the cold-start rule for starchy potatoes is still taught.