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February 3
Menu: Consomme du Barry; Roast Ribs of Beef; Franconia Potatoes; Corn Cakes; Mashed Turnips; Radish Salad; Marshmallow Pudding; Coffee Franconia Potatoes-Pare 10 medium-sized potatoes; parboil five minutes. Place on grate under roast ribs of beef. Baste with melted Crisco, and bake from 20 to 30 minutes, turning often.
A drip-pan side dish from the Crisco cookbook: potatoes parboiled, then finished under a beef roast so they catch the fat. The method works, but the timing assumes a much hotter roasting oven than most beef is cooked in now.
- The hinge: parboil then dryFive minutes in boiling water only softens the outer layer. Drain the potatoes and let the surface steam dry for a minute before they go under the roast, or the fat will not brown them and they steam instead.
- SizingTen medium potatoes probably means whole potatoes of roughly 5-6 oz each, though the book gives no weight. Halving or quartering them gives more browned surface and brings them closer to the stated time.
- Timing is shortWhole parboiled potatoes at 325-350F, the range most rib roasts are cooked in, want 45-60 minutes, not 20-30. The recipe gives no temperature, and the short time implies a hotter roasting oven than is usual now. Judge by a skewer sliding in cleanly, not the clock.
- The grate under the roastThis is the rack in a roasting pan with the beef above it, so drippings fall on the potatoes. A modern equivalent is putting the beef on a rack and the potatoes in the pan beneath, spread in a single layer.
- CriscoThen a new all-vegetable hydrogenated shortening, since reformulated to cut the hydrogenated fat and now labelled 0g trans fat per serving. Any neutral high-heat fat works; beef dripping from the roast itself is the obvious substitute and needs little extra basting.
- Turning oftenEvery 10-15 minutes is enough. Each turn costs oven heat, which matters more when the roast is sharing the space.
- Resting the beefIf the potatoes need longer than the roast, lift the beef out to rest and raise the oven to 425F for the last stretch. The meat improves for the rest and the potatoes crisp.
- YieldTen potatoes serves six to eight alongside a roast.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble to teach cooks what to do with a fat that had only reached the market in 1911. Franconia potatoes are simply potatoes roasted in the drippings of the joint, a method as old as the spit; the name is generally traced to Franconia in New Hampshire, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented, and by the late nineteenth century it appears in American cookbooks as a fixed term for parboiled potatoes browned under or around a roast. The recipe's real work here is promotional: basting with Crisco rather than beef fat is the point being made, since the whole book exists to argue that a vegetable shortening can stand in wherever lard or dripping had always been used.