Home › Vegetables › Saratoga Potatoes
Saratoga Potatoes
Peel and slice as thin as possible with a very sharp knife or a slaw cutter. Drain them and dry in a cloth. Have lard boiling and drop in a few at a time. Salt as you take out and lay them on a blotting pad to absorb the grease. These are nice for lunch or picnics. -Mrs. John Fletcher.
POTATOES A LA MAÎTRE D'HOTEL.
Boil the potatoes until tender, then peel and cut into slices; put them into a stewpan with fresh butter, parsley and cives chopped up; salt, pepper and a very little vinegar; warm them up and serve. Oil may be used in place of butter. If the potatoes are very small they need not be sliced.
Two potato dishes run together: chips fried in lard, and a buttered boiled-potato dish in the French style. Both are workable as written, with a few gaps that reflect what a 1900 cook assumed.
- The missing soak"Drain them" implies a step the recipe skips: the slices go into cold water as they are cut, which rinses off surface starch and keeps them from sticking together in the fat. Ten to twenty minutes is enough, and they must then be dried thoroughly or the lard will spit violently.
- Fat temperature"Lard boiling" means about 350-375F, not literal boiling. Lard's smoke point sits at roughly the top of that range, so it wants watching; peanut or a neutral vegetable oil behaves much the same way at this temperature.
- A few at a timeThis is the hinge. Crowding the pan drops the temperature and the slices steam rather than crisp. Fry in small handfuls, two to four minutes each, until the bubbling slows and the colour is pale gold.
- Slicing thinA slaw cutter is a wooden-framed adjustable blade, close kin to the mandoline. Aim for about 1/16 inch; thicker slices give a chip that is leathery in the middle.
- Blotting padAbsorbent paper of the sort used to blot ink. Use paper towel or a wire rack set over a tray, and salt while the chips are still hot so it clings.
- CivesAn older spelling of chives. Use a generous tablespoon or two, chopped, with about the same amount of parsley for 1 1/2 lb of potatoes.
- The vinegar"A very little" means roughly a teaspoon for a pound and a half of potatoes; it is there to lift the butter, not to be tasted as vinegar. A waxy potato holds its shape far better than a floury one in the stewpan.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; about 1 1/2 lb of potatoes would give four modest portions of either dish. The fried slices are best within the hour, as they soften as they sit; the recipe suggests them for lunch or picnics.
Saratoga potatoes take their name from Saratoga Springs, New York, the fashionable spa and racing resort whose hotel kitchens are traditionally credited with the very thin fried potato slice in the 1850s; the often-repeated story of a particular cook inventing them to spite a fussy diner is folklore rather than documented fact. By the time this book was compiled the name was widely used in America for what the British called potato crisps, and the dish was still largely a home-kitchen production, fried in lard and blotted on paper, rather than a packaged factory product. The second recipe belongs to a different tradition: à la maître d'hôtel is French kitchen shorthand for butter worked with parsley, seasoning and a little acid, and its appearance beside a hotel-resort chip shows how comfortably American household cookbooks of the period mixed regional inventions with borrowed restaurant French.