It’s widely accepted that rosin potatoes hail from the South’s turpentine camps, where workers chipped and slashed and scraped pine trees to collect oleoresin (aka resin or gum), the trees’ natural defense mechanism. When a tree’s bark is breached — by a beetle, fungus, or a woodsman’s hack — it oozes gum, not sap, from the wound. When fossilized, oleoresin transforms into amber. When distilled, it yields turpentine and rosin, whose uses range from paint thinner and Vicks VapoRub to rubber cement and chewing gum, respectively.
The rosin potato origin story goes one of two ways. A hapless worker dropped a potato into hot rosin as it was coming off the still, and when the potato came to the surface, he pulled it out and found a perfectly cooked spud. Alternately, an industrious worker saw in molten rosin an efficient method for making a hot lunch.
Outside the context of the woods, cooking potatoes in rosin is a wholly impractical preparation.
Rosin is highly flammable, and its fumes are noxious. It requires a dedicated pot and tongs; there’s no easy cleaning of hardened rosin. Oh — and you can’t eat the potato’s skin.
Despite those odds, the technique went mainstream in the 1950s and merited inclusion in James Beard’s 1960 Treasury of Outdoor Cooking and in the 1975 edition of The Joy of Cooking. In 1976, rosin potatoes were on the table the night my parents got engaged at Art’s Steakhouse in Gainesville, Florida, and Cracker Barrel served the potatoes from 1983 through 1991.
Rosin potato loyalists say the preparation yields a superior potato with a flaky texture. Just as oleoresin seals a tree’s wounds, rosin traps a potato’s flavor and aroma, according to chef Sean Brock, who included rosin potatoes on the debut menu at Audrey, his fine-dining restaurant in Nashville. “Because none of the potato’s flavor or aroma compounds can escape, you get the most intense potato flavor you’ve ever experienced,” Brock says. “And they’re steaming in their own water, which is why you get a totally unique texture.”
Outside of Audrey, you won’t find rosin potatoes in many restaurants these days. Except in vintage cookbooks, Reddit forums, and a smattering of rural festivals, rosin potatoes all but disappeared from the American culinary canon.