This section is from the book "Practical Cooking And Serving", by Janet McKenzie Hill. Also available from Amazon: Practical Cooking and Serving: A Complete Manual of How to Select, Prepare, and Serve Food [1919].
Select ripe new potatoes and scrub them until the outer skin is removed; boil quickly in boiling salted water, drain perfectly dry and dust lightly with salt from the dredger, cover with a cloth and keep hot on the back of the range. Fold the potatoes, singly, in a hot, dry cloth, twist the ends of the cloth in opposite directions tightly, then drop the dry mealy potato, white as snow, into the serving-dish. Serve before they have become cold.
Pick out small, round, ripe potatoes, wash and peel them. Put them into a cheesecloth sack and tie the top. Have ready a sauce
pan containing enough of equal parts of milk and water (slightly salted) to cover the potatoes. Simmer slowly until they are done. Lift out the sack, allow them to drain on a colander a few minutes, then place in the oven to dry five minutes. Prepare a rich cream sauce seasoned with butter and salt. Remove potatoes from the sack, put them in a saucepan over hot water, and cover with the sauce. Serve in a deep vegetable dish.
Pass through a ricer eight hot boiled potatoes; add three tablespoonfuls of butter, half teaspoonful of salt, and about half cup of hot milk or cream; beat thoroughly with perforated cake spoon, and pass through the ricer or vegetable press about the meat.
First scrub thoroughly with a vegetable brush, then put into a hot oven. Potatoes of moderate size require in baking about forty-five minutes; they are at their best as soon as they are soft throughout. As the heat is usually strongest from above, turn the potatoes, occasionally, to insure even baking. On removal from the oven, break the skin, to let the steam escape, lest the naturally dry, mealy potato become "soggy" from the quickly condensing steam. A potato baked in a slow oven is less digestible than the same when properly boiled.
Whether potatoes are to be pared after scrubbing is a matter of taste as well as economy and needs be decided in each individual case. (The United States Government has recently furnished opportunity for experiments by which the exact quantity of nutritive elements wasted by cooking pared potatoes, both before and after soaking in cold water, could be determined.) Cooked without paring, the skins hold back mineral salts, some proteid and starch, hence where a dietary is restricted it were well to retain the skin. Old potatoes that have lost water by evaporation will be better if they be soaked in cold water, or at least put over the fire to cook in cold water. Let the potatoes be of uniform size and, if large, cut in halves lengthwise. Rapid boiling pulverizes the outside before the centre becomes tender. After the potatoes have become tender proceed as for "perfect" potatoes, omitting the twisting in the cloth.
 
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