Why do Russians eat potatoes without the skin?

[William Ryan]

I don't think the practice can be proved to have originated anywhere or 
at any particular time, certainly not the US in the 1960s - hungry 
people everywhere probably came to the same conclusions independently. 
Certainly my recollections of it in England go back to the 1940s. And 
various types of pommes de terre farcies certainly exist in France.

The standard mid-late 19th c. Russian cookbook by Molokhovets gives 
baked potatoes as no. 455 (English translation by Toomre) - it instructs 
the housewife to wipe the potates without washing them, bake them in the 
oven or stove, and serve for breakfast with butter and salt - doesn't 
mention whether the skin was eaten or not, which to me suggests that it 
was optional.

The first edition of Mrs Beeton' famous Book of Household Management 
(1859-61), for decades the Bible of English and possibly also American 
cooks (the book was also published in the US), gives instructions on 
cooking and serving baked potatoes (no. 1136). She observes: "the 
browned skin of  a baked potato is by many persons condidered the better 
part of it".

As for ice-cold beer - well, what is the point of brewing a fine flavour 
if you then freeze it to death? I don't think Americans really like beer.

Will Ryan


On 08/02/2010 14:25, George Kalbouss wrote:
> Here are the recollections of an oldster.  The practice of eating potato skins originated
> in the US, and probably in the late 60's.  I think it was accompanied by the advent of putting
> sour cream on potatoes instead of, or with, butter  (funny, that seems like a Russian thing
> to do).  Not long afterwards, "potato skins" began appearing, served as an appetizer in bars
> with cheese, sour cream, bacon bits, and so on.  Since then, skins began appearing on french fries, potato salad, ettc.
> I wonder if it was sour cream that turned Americans onto skin.
>
> 	Another seemingly uninteresting food became glorified not long afterwards, i.e., the
> chicken wing, spiced up in the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, NY, and hence, the "buffalo wing."
>
> 	While discussing items that Americans consume which others do not, how about that
> staple, H2O, which Europeans would be caught dead drinking unless it was mineral water?
> Ice cubes are not far behind.  Ditto ice cold beer.
>
> George Kalbouss
> Prof. (Emer.)  Slavic Languages and Literatures
> The Ohio State University
>
>
> On Feb 8, 2010, at 8:55 AM, Don Livingston wrote:
>
>    
>> I wonder if there has been a shift in US attitudes towards potatoes eaten
>> with their skins on? To my memory, in the sixties (in Arizona) we always ate
>> the center of our baked potatoes, but never the skins.  In the early
>> seventies I remember being quite surprised when I first saw someone eat a
>> baked potato skin, and I also recall a college conversation in the eighties
>> where one of my friends insisted that one did not have to clean the potatoes
>> before baking them.  (Potatoes sold in standard grocery stores at the time
>> were already washed, so she felt one did not have to wash them again.)  I
>> concluded at the time that if one intended to eat the skins, one scrubbed
>> them again before cooking which had two effects:  1- it removed what little
>> dirt remained, and 2- it made the skins thinner and more tender since we
>> used a stiff plastic vegetable brush to scrub them.
>>
>> So from my solipsistic perspective, eating potatoes skin-on was less common
>> in the sixties, more common in the seventies, and very common from the
>> eighties onward.  Perhaps people older than I can fill in the years previous
>> to that?
>>
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