The Cooking of Potatoes

Recently someone gave me a tattered paperback copy of Elizabeth David's French Country Cooking (first published in 1951). I read it in bed (yes, I read cookbooks in bed), on the subway, on the back deck. She was a glorious writer with a strong character and this passage on potatoes rather stopped me in my tracks - it's both imperious and practical, marks of a sure hand in the kitchen.

THE COOKING OF POTATOES

For sauté potatoes cook the potatoes in their skins; peel, slice and sauté them gently in dripping or butter, adding a little chopped onion and parsley at the end.
Potatoes for salad should also be cooked in their skins, peeled and mixed with the dressing or mayonnaise while still warm.
For Pommes Pailles, Allumettes and all variations of chips, the raw potatoes should be plunged into plenty of water to wash away the outer starch which otherwise makes them stick together in the cooking.
Put new potatoes into boiling water.
Go to the extra trouble of mashing potatoes through a sieve and adding warmed milk.
To keep boiled potatoes hot cover them with a clean tea-cloth instead of the lid of the serving dish. This absorbs the moisture and results in dry and floury, instead of sodden, potatoes.
Mashed fried potatoes should be done in bacon fat, very little of it, and watched constantly.
Rub the outside of potatoes for baking with a coating of salt.
Baked potatoes are delicious eaten with aïoli instead of butter.

My husband, who makes fine mashed potatoes, always does that trick with the dish towel over the pot, instead of a lid. I'm not quite sure where he picked it up, but he's in good company.