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Potato Fritters
Grate six cold potatoes that have been boiled, add to them one pint of cream or new milk, and flour enough to make as stiff a batter as for other [189] fritters, the yolks of three eggs, then the beaten whites, salt and fry in nice, sweet butter.
A shallow-fried batter fritter built on leftover boiled potatoes, written in the elliptical style of its period: no quantities for flour or salt, no pan temperature, no yield. A few decisions have to be made for it.
- The hinge: fold, don't stirThe yolks go into the batter, the beaten whites go in last and are folded through. Stir them in and the fritters turn dense and gluey; folded properly they puff and stay light.
- "New milk" and "sweet butter"New milk is simply fresh whole milk, unsoured. Sweet butter means unsalted rather than salted or rancid; use unsalted and salt the batter yourself.
- A pint is two cups, but start with lessTwo cups of cream to six potatoes gives a very loose base that then needs a great deal of flour. Begin with about a cup of milk or cream and add more only if the batter is too tight.
- How much flour"Stiff a batter as for other fritters" means it should mound on the spoon and fall slowly, not pour. Reckon on roughly 1 to 1 1/2 cups of flour for six medium potatoes, added gradually.
- Grate them coldPotatoes boiled the day before and thoroughly chilled grate cleanly. Warm potatoes smear into paste and the fritters come out heavy.
- Frying in butterWhole butter browns and burns well below frying temperature. Clarified butter, or butter cut with a neutral oil, holds around 350-365F, which is where these should be cooked: about two to three minutes a side until deep gold.
- SeasoningBoiled potatoes and unsalted butter give you nothing to work with. Around a teaspoon of salt for this quantity; pepper, or a scrape of nutmeg, if you like.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; six potatoes and this much batter should make somewhere in the region of eighteen to two dozen fritters, depending on size. Fry in batches and hold them in a low oven on a rack, not on paper, so they stay crisp.
Potato fritters belong to the long nineteenth-century tradition of making yesterday's boiled potatoes worth eating again, a concern that recurs in household manuals of the era. The technique itself — a batter lightened with separately beaten egg whites, then fried — is older than the potato's respectability in English and American cooking, and was applied to apples, oysters, corn and parsnips in turn. The instruction to use "cream or new milk" is a reminder that this book was written for households with access to milk that had not been standardised or long-stored; "new" milk meant that day's, before it soured. Fritters of this kind were served as a vegetable alongside meat rather than as a sweet.