3. Perfectly prepared potatoes were no problem with this tip
There were many cookbooks of the mid-to-late 19th century which treated potatoes with disdain. Mrs. Beeton, whose cookbook was entitled. Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management regarded potatoes as, “…narcotic, and many are deleterious” (she also found lobster to be unpalatable). But potatoes became a large part of standard diet in the 19th century, and remain so. One of the primary means of cooking them was boiling and it was also easy to boil them too long with too much salt, or too little, leading to a poorly flavored and mushy result.
A simple tip to prevent such a disaster was to simply add sugar with the salt when the water had come to a boil, which ensured its dissolving quickly and evenly. Once boiled sufficiently the potatoes were drained and returned to the heat and the pot shaken, allowing them to dry evenly, and the wise cook completed the task with perfectly textured potatoes to present at table. Whether they would be succulent enough to alter the opinion expressed by Mrs. Beeton would be anybody’s guess. Most likely they would not.