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Boil a Potato in Its Jacket
The Irishman's way of boiling the potato in its jacket is correct, because in this way the salts are not absorbed. The best method is to bake them; the next, to steam them. If they are to be boiled, there should be plenty of boiling salted water, as soon as it boils hard after the potatoes are in, the kettle should be set back, where it will boil gently but constantly until done. For the average potato, from twenty to twenty-five minutes will be required. Tubers and vegetables that grow under the ground are usually not cooked enough, while green vegetables are submitted to too long cooking.
A method note rather than a formal recipe: the instruction is to leave the skin on and keep the water at a gentle roll. Both still hold up.
- Why the jacketThe claim about "salts" is broadly right, if imprecisely worded. Peeled potatoes leach potassium and water-soluble vitamins into the cooking water; an intact skin limits that considerably.
- Start hot, then ease offA hard boil knocks the outside of the potato about before the centre is done. The recipe asks for the water to be brought back to a gentle but constant boil once the potatoes are in, which is what setting the kettle back on the range achieved.
- "The kettle"Here this means the cooking pot, not a tea kettle. Setting it back meant sliding it to a cooler part of a wood or coal range; on a modern hob, drop the heat to low.
- Salted water with skins onSalt barely penetrates an unpeeled potato, so it does little beyond seasoning the surface. It costs nothing to add, but do not expect seasoned flesh.
- TimingTwenty to twenty-five minutes suits a medium potato; larger ones will take appreciably longer. Test with a skewer at the thickest point rather than by the clock.
- Baking, if you follow the rankingThe author ranks baking first and steaming second, but gives no oven temperature or timing for either. Modern practice for a large baked potato is a hot oven, skin pricked, until a skewer goes through easily.
- The green vegetable remarkStill sound advice, and now standard practice. Starchy tubers like the potato need cooking right through; greens want the shortest possible time in the pot.
The "Irishman's way" seems to have been a familiar turn of phrase in nineteenth-century cookery writing, and the potato in its skin carried real cultural weight: Ireland's dependence on the crop before and after the blight of the 1840s made the Irish widely regarded as authorities on cooking it, even in books that used the reference half-jokingly. The nutritional argument here reflects the period's new enthusiasm for food chemistry, when domestic-science writers were beginning to explain old kitchen habits in terms of mineral "salts" and leaching rather than simple custom. The observation that root vegetables are usually undercooked and green vegetables overcooked was a common complaint of the era, when cabbage and beans were often said to be boiled for an hour or more.