Home › Supper › Potatoes Fried in Curls
Potatoes Fried in Curls
Peel large potatoes and slice in half inch slices, then cut them round and round, as you pare apples; drop each curl in ice cold water for a few minutes, then drain dry in a towel and fry in hot lard until they are crisped, but hardly browned; take out upon a sieve and sprinkle a little pepper and salt over them. They are a very nice supper dish.
A pre-food-processor potato chip: the curls are pared off a thick slice in one continuous ribbon, the way you would peel an apple in a single strip. Everything else follows from getting them bone dry before they hit the fat.
- The cutSlice the peeled potato into half-inch rounds, then run a sharp paring knife or swivel peeler around the edge of each round, spiralling inward, to produce a long ribbon. A spiralizer will get you something roughly comparable faster, though not identical; the shape matters only for crispness and looks.
- Why the ice waterThe soak rinses off surface starch so the curls fry crisp rather than sticking together in a mass. A few minutes is enough, and russets or other floury potatoes crisp better than waxy ones.
- Drain dry means dryThis is the hinge. Any water left on the curls will spit violently in the fat and steam the surface instead of crisping it. Blot between two towels until they feel dry to the touch.
- Lard and temperatureThe recipe says only 'hot lard' and gives no number; modern practice for thin potato would put it somewhere around 350-360F. Lard fries beautifully and is still sold, but any neutral high-smoke-point oil works. Much below 325F the curls tend to absorb fat and go limp; much above 375F they colour before they dry out.
- "Crisped but hardly browned"Take them out pale gold, not deep brown. Thin potato ribbons carry very little interior moisture and turn bitter quickly once they pass blond. Reckon on one to two minutes a batch.
- Fry in small batchesA crowded pan drops the fat temperature and the curls tangle. Cook a handful at a time, lift onto a rack or sieve as the original says, and season the moment they come out while the surface is still tacky with fat.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; a couple of large potatoes will make a bowlful. The original calls it a supper dish. They are best within the hour and do not keep.
Fried potato slivers belong to the same late-nineteenth-century enthusiasm that produced the Saratoga chip, the shoestring and the potato ribbon, all of which spread through American cookbooks and hotel menus in the decades after the Civil War as cheap frying fat and abundant potatoes met a taste for novelty shapes. The spiral cut described here is a straight borrowing from apple-paring, a skill every kitchen already had, and the recipe assumes the reader can take a peel off in one unbroken strip without being told how. The recipe offers it as "a very nice supper dish," and supper in many households of the period was a light, informal spread of cold cuts, breads and small hot dishes, the sort of meal that something like this here in the celler — quick, showy, made from what was in the cellar — might well have filled out.