The Best Way to Boil Potatoes Comes From a 19th-Century New York Recipe

Syracuse salt potatoes, a Central New York specialty, combines bite-sized spuds with ‘an obscene amount of salt’ for a creamy, crave-worthy side dish.

Syracuse salt potatoes have a thin, white, salty crust and perfectly creamy insides. rudisill/Getty Images

The recipe couldn’t be simpler, although anyone with high blood pressure may find it alarming: Add two cups of salt to a pot of boiling water. Throw in unpeeled potatoes and cook for about 20 minutes until they’re so salt-covered that they look white when they dry. Slather them with butter, and you’ve got yourself a meal—or at least a side dish.

I had my doubts—they’re just potatoes, I thought—but three batches in, I can’t believe how wrong I was about these tiny spud bombs of creaminess. Devotees of Syracuse salt potatoes swear by them, and the Central New York dish shares an origin story with Syracuse’s unlikely moniker: Salt City.

An Accident of Geology

More than 370 million years ago, what is now the state of New York lay at the bottom of a tropical sea.