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Potatoes, Cold, Fried in Slices
Cut up half a dozen firm, boiled potatoes in slices a quarter of an inch thick. Put these into a saucepan with two ounces of fresh butter, and shake them over the fire until they are lightly browned. Sprinkle over them a little pepper and salt, a table-spoonful of chopped parsley, a tea-spoonful finely-minced onion, and the juice of half a small lemon. A tea-spoonful of good brown gravy may be added or not. Serve very hot. Time, ten minutes to fry the potatoes. Probable cost, 6d. Sufficient for two or three persons.
A straightforward leftover-potato dish that depends almost entirely on the potatoes being cold and dry before they hit the butter. A few of the original's assumptions need translating.
- Start with cold potatoesThe slices must be fully cooled, ideally refrigerated overnight, so the starch has firmed and they hold their shape. Warm boiled potatoes crumble the moment you shake the pan.
- "Shake them over the fire" means a wide panThe original says saucepan, but browning six potatoes' worth of slices needs surface area. Use a 10-12 inch skillet and work in two batches rather than crowding, or you steam instead of fry.
- Two ounces of butterThat is 4 tablespoons, about 55 g. It is generous but correct for six potatoes; butter alone will darken over the ten minutes, so keep the heat at medium and add a spoonful of neutral oil if your pan runs hot.
- Turn, do not stirDespite the instruction to shake, quarter-inch rounds brown best left undisturbed for three or four minutes a side. Shaking constantly gives you pale, greasy slices.
- The lemon and parsley go in off the heatAdd the pepper, salt, parsley, onion and lemon juice at the end, once the potatoes are browned. The minced raw onion softens in the residual heat without burning, and the acid stays bright.
- "Good brown gravy"A teaspoonful of meat gravy or reduced stock, purely for savour. A few drops of soy sauce or a small piece of demi-glace does the same job if you have no roast to draw on.
- Cost and yieldSixpence was a small sum, and the point of the dish was thrift. It serves two or three as a side; the ten minutes is realistic only if the pan is properly hot to begin with.
Cassell's devoted whole runs of entries to what to do with yesterday's potatoes, and this is one of a family of them. Boiled potatoes were cooked in quantity for the main dinner and could appear again at breakfast or supper, and a compiler who could not offer several ways to reuse them was of limited use to a cook feeding a household on a fixed allowance. The seasoning here -- parsley, a little raw onion, lemon juice, an optional spoonful of gravy -- sits at the more genteel end of that tradition, closer to the French *pommes sautées* than to a plain hash, and the printed "probable cost" was a standard feature of the book, alongside "time" and "sufficient for".