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Franconia Potatoes
(White and Sweet) 1-The potatoes should be peeled, dusted with salt and put in the pan with the roasting meat, forty-five minutes being allowed for the cookery. They should be turned once. 2-If no meat is being roasted, boil the pared potatoes ten minutes, dust with salt and pepper, dip in Mazola, put in a baking pan containing a very little Mazola and bake until well browned, in a hot oven, 375 degrees F., turning two or three times to brown them evenly.
Two methods for the same dish: potatoes browned in the roasting pan alongside the meat, or browned on their own in oil. The second version is the more useful one now, since few households roast a large joint on a weeknight.
- Mazola is corn oilMazola was, and is, a refined corn oil; this book was written when corn oil was a novelty worth naming. Any neutral high-smoke-point oil works, though rendered beef fat or duck fat gives a better crust.
- That oven temperature is not hotThe recipe calls 375F a "hot oven," which is a moderate oven by current reckoning. For faster, more emphatic browning use 425-450F; at 375F the potatoes will colour more slowly and may need closer to an hour.
- White and sweet potatoes are not interchangeable in timeThe headnote covers both, but sweet potatoes have more sugar and less starch, so they tend to colour and soften faster. Watch them, and consider adding them to the roasting pan later than the white ones.
- The ten-minute parboil is the hingeIt gelatinizes the outer starch so the surface roughens and crisps. Drain thoroughly and let the steam blow off for a minute before oiling, or the water will keep the exteriors from setting.
- Give them room"A very little Mazola" and a single layer with space between the pieces. Crowded potatoes steam each other and never take color, however long they stay in.
- Roasting with the meatSet the potatoes in the fat that has already rendered, not in a dry pan, and keep the pieces to a similar size so they finish together. The recipe gives no oven temperature for the roast, so the forty-five minutes will depend on how hot the meat is being cooked.
- YieldThe original gives no quantity. Reckon one medium potato per person, or about 2 lb for four, and taste for seasoning again after roasting.
"Franconia potatoes" is an American cookbook name, common from the late nineteenth century into the mid twentieth, for potatoes parboiled and then browned in the roasting pan with the meat; the term appears in Fannie Farmer and in other household manuals of the period, and its connection to Franconia in New Hampshire or to the German region is often asserted but not documented. The dish existed because the roasting pan was already hot and already full of fat, and wasting either was unthinkable. What dates this particular version is the second method and the branded oil in it: books of this kind were frequently underwritten by manufacturers, and instructing the cook to dip potatoes in Mazola rather than in drippings was part of teaching American kitchens that a bottled vegetable oil could do the work of beef fat and lard.