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To Boil Potatoes

Boiled potatoes with salt, cooked until tender, then drained and skins removed.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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To Boil Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the potatoes thoroughly with a brush, ensuring to clean the eyes without peeling them.

  2. Place the potatoes in a pot and cover them with cold water.

  3. Add a ½ handful of coarse sea salt to the water.

Boil

  1. If the potatoes are large, add 1 cup of cold water when they begin to boil, repeating this occasionally.

  2. Boil the potatoes for 30 to 75 minutes, depending on their size, until a fork easily pierces them.

Dry and serve

  1. Once cooked, pour off the water and return the pot to the heat without a lid for 1-2 minutes to dry them.

  2. Remove the skins and serve.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Their starch softens as they cook, giving the flesh a tender, fork-yielding texture.

The step that matters

Adding cold water when the pot boils. If the water boils too hard, the outside of a large potato can break down before the centre is cooked. Adding cold water lowers the temperature so the heat reaches the middle more evenly.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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