Home › The Principles of Cookery › POTATO FRITTERS (other ways)
POTATO FRITTERS (other ways)
Boil and peel the potatoes, grate or mash them, add four well-beaten eggs, a little cream, chopped parsley, chives, salt, and spice, and mix the whole well together. Drop a tea-spoonful of this paste into a pan of boiling lard or butter, when it will swell into a light fritter. Or, take the mealy part of potatoes roasted under the ashes; beat it in a mortar with a little fine salt, a table-spoonful of brandy, some fresh butter and cream. Mix the whole, adding gradually a well-beaten egg; shape the paste into small balls, which roll in flour, fry, and serve, sprinkled with powdered sugar.
Two versions of the same idea: a soft potato batter dropped straight into hot fat, and a richer roasted-potato paste rolled into balls. Neither gives quantities for the potatoes, so work backwards from the eggs.
- Potato quantityThe recipe gives none, so you must judge by feel. Four well-beaten eggs will bind something in the region of 2 lb (about 900 g) of cooked potato; much less and the paste will not hold a spoon shape in the fat. The second version, with one egg but also butter, cream and brandy, will take rather less potato in proportion — start well under a pound of roasted flesh and add more only if the paste is too slack to roll.
- Choose a floury potatoThe recipe assumes a mealy, dry-fleshed potato — Russet, Maris Piper, King Edward. Waxy salad potatoes hold too much water and the fritters will slump and spit.
- Dry the potato before mixingThis is the hinge. Drain boiled potatoes and return them to the dry pan over low heat for a minute to steam off moisture. Wet potato gives a paste that disintegrates in the fat rather than swelling.
- "Roasted under the ashes"A whole potato buried in the embers of a hearth fire. The nearest modern equivalent is a hot oven, around 400F, for an hour, until the skin is crisp and the inside dry; scoop out the flesh and discard the skin. The smoky character of the hearth will be missing.
- Fat and temperature"Boiling lard" means fat at frying heat, not literally boiling — 350-375F (175-190C). Lard is authentic and takes the heat well; butter alone will brown and burn at that temperature, so use clarified butter if you want the flavour.
- A little creamRoughly 2-3 tablespoons in the first version. Add it last and gradually: the batter should drop from a spoon in a soft lump, not run.
- SpiceUnspecified "spice" here is most likely grated nutmeg, with mace or white pepper as plausible alternatives.
- Two dishes, not oneThe first is savoury — parsley, chives, salt — and belongs beside meat. The second, with brandy, sugar and no herbs, is a sweet fritter for the end of the meal. Do not blend the two lists.
- YieldTeaspoon-sized drops from a batch this size give a great many small fritters — count on well over three dozen, so scale down if you are not feeding a crowd. Fry in batches of six or eight so the fat stays hot, and drain on paper.
Potato fritters belong to the long nineteenth-century effort to make the potato interesting. Cassell's, like most Victorian household dictionaries, gives a headline recipe and then a string of "other ways" gathered from earlier printed sources, which is why two quite different dishes sit in one paragraph here. The second — roasted potato pounded in a mortar with brandy, butter and cream, then fried and dusted with sugar — is a sweet, richer preparation; the first, with parsley and chives, is plainer household cooking. The instruction to roast the potato "under the ashes" is a fossil of open-hearth cooking, still printed decades after the closed range had come into use, and it is a reminder that these compilations preserved their sources' wording long after the equipment had changed.