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French Fried Potatoes
Thinly pare the potatoes and cut them in eighths lengthwise, if small; in sixteenths, if they are very large. Let the cut potatoes stand in cold water for thirty minutes, drain on a cloth and fry in deep Snowdrift, hot enough to brown a bit of bread in one and a half minutes. Drain on crumpled, unglazed paper. Dust lightly with salt, and serve.
A single-fry method from a shortening manufacturer's promotional cookbook. The advice holds up, with two things worth translating: what "Snowdrift" was, and what the bread test actually means in degrees.
- SnowdriftA brand of cottonseed-oil shortening, sold in tins as a lard substitute. Any neutral high-smoke-point fat works: peanut, refined sunflower, or a modern vegetable shortening. Do not use butter.
- The bread test in numbersA cube of bread browning in about a minute and a half puts the fat somewhere around 350F, give or take. That is a moderate frying temperature, not a fierce one, and it suits this method: the potatoes cook through and colour in one pass rather than being blanched and refried.
- The cold-water soak is the hingeThirty minutes in cold water rinses off surface starch, which is what otherwise makes the pieces glue together and darken unevenly.
- Dry them properly"Drain on a cloth" means dry, not damp. Wet potatoes drop the fat temperature sharply and spit. Pat each batch and let it air a minute before it goes in.
- Cut sizeEighths lengthwise from a small potato gives thick wedges closer to steak fries than to modern shoestrings. Sixteenths from a large baking potato gives narrower wedges, roughly half an inch at the widest. Either is fine, but keep one batch uniform so it cooks evenly.
- BatchesFry in small handfuls. Crowding the pan is the other way the temperature collapses; the fat should recover quickly between additions.
- Unglazed paperBrown paper or newsprint at the time; use a rack over a sheet pan, or paper towels. A rack keeps the undersides from steaming soft.
- YieldNot stated. Reckon on one medium potato (6-8 oz) per person as a side, salted the moment they leave the fat while the surface is still hot enough to hold it.
A New Snowdrift Cook Book belongs to a genre that flourished in the early twentieth century: the cookbook published by a food manufacturer to teach cooks how to use a new product. Snowdrift was a cottonseed shortening, and cottonseed oil — a byproduct of the Southern cotton industry that had once been treated as near-waste — became cheap, plentiful, and, once hardened, a direct competitor to lard. Recipes like this one exist to demonstrate that the new fat could take deep-frying heat cleanly and without flavour of its own. The dish itself was already well established in American cooking by then; "French fried" in period usage refers to the frying method, and period cookbooks apply the phrase to other vegetables as well. Note the single fry: the now-standard two-stage blanch-and-crisp method is absent here.