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Lattice Potatoes
Wash and pare potatoes of a uniform size. Slice on a corrugated vegetable slicer, which is made for this purpose. Wash slices in cold water, changing the water several times; then let stand several hours in cold water. Drain and dry with crash towels. Fry a few at a time in deep hot Cottolene, drain on brown paper, sprinkle with salt. Pile on a lace paper doily in a fancy basket.
This is a waffle-cut potato chip, and the method is sound — the only things that have changed are the fat, the slicer and the draining surface.
- The hinge: soaking, then dryingThe long soak in repeatedly changed water pulls out surface starch so the slices crisp rather than glue together, and the thorough drying keeps the oil from spitting and the chips from steaming. Skip either step and you get limp, sticking lattices.
- CottoleneA branded cottonseed-oil shortening heavily advertised in this period, and the book's sponsor product. Any neutral high-smoke-point fat works: peanut, refined sunflower or a solid vegetable shortening.
- Corrugated vegetable slicerA mandoline with a waffle or crinkle blade. The lattice effect comes from rotating the potato 90 degrees between each pass, so alternate slices cut across the previous ridges; slice about 1/8 inch thick.
- Frying temperatureThe book gives no temperature; "deep hot" is left to the cook's judgement. Modern practice for potato chips is roughly 350-375F: below that they absorb fat, much above and the edges brown before the centre dries out. Fry in small batches so the oil temperature does not crash.
- Crash towelsCrash was a coarse plain-woven linen used for kitchen towelling. A clean flour-sack towel does the same job; paper towels are fine too.
- Brown paperUnprinted kraft paper or a paper bag was the standard drain. A rack over a tray keeps the undersides crisper than paper does.
- SaltingSalt while the chips are still glossy with oil so it adheres. Once they cool it slides off.
- YieldFigure one medium potato per person as a side, two if the chips are the centrepiece of the plate. They are best within an hour and do not reheat well.
52 Sunday Dinners was published by the makers of Cottolene, a cottonseed-oil-and-beef-suet shortening sold from the later nineteenth century, and most heavily advertised in the 1890s and 1900s, as a cheaper, lighter substitute for lard, which explains why the fat is named by brand in a recipe that otherwise assumes an experienced cook. The lattice or waffle cut was long familiar — gaufrette-style corrugated cutting was known in earlier nineteenth-century practice — and it was well served by the patented hand slicers and corrugated cutters that filled housewares catalogues around the turn of the century; the recipe's real subject is display: fried potatoes were an everyday food, but cut into a lattice, piled on a lace paper doily and served in a fancy basket they became a garnish worth a place on the Sunday table. Paper doilies and "fancy baskets" were themselves cheap novelties of the period, arguably letting a middle-class household stage a kind of ornamental service that may once have called for costlier materials.