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POTATOES, FRIED (another way) (Cut the potatoes into slices)
Cut the potatoes into slices about the thickness of a shilling, then fry them in clarified dripping. If you have any goose dripping, it will do better. When the potatoes are fried a fine brown colour and crisp, drain all the grease on a towel, and serve them quite hot on a napkin, or in a deep dish; they cannot be dished nicely in any other way. Do not forget to sprinkle them over with a little pounded salt.
A plain crisp-fried potato slice, of the kind that became the English crisp. The recipe assumes you know how hot the fat should be, so that is the gap worth filling.
- "The thickness of a shilling"A Victorian shilling was roughly 1.5 mm — a thin coin, not a wafer. A mandoline on a thin setting or a steady knife gets you there; much thinner and the slices scorch before they crisp.
- Fat temperatureThe instruction to fry until "a fine brown colour and crisp" needs about 340-350F for slices this thin. Below that they absorb fat and go leathery; much above and the edges blacken while the centre is still soft.
- Clarified drippingBeef dripping with the water and meat sediment strained or settled out, which is why it takes the heat without smoking. Goose fat, as the book says, is better — it is softer-flavoured and has a broadly comparable smoke point. Refined vegetable oil works as a modern substitute.
- Rinse and dry firstNot stated here: soak the slices briefly to wash off surface starch, then dry them thoroughly on a cloth. Wet potato in hot fat spits and the slices weld together.
- Fry in small batchesA crowded pan drops the fat temperature sharply, which is the usual cause of soggy results. Give the slices room and lift them out as they colour rather than all at once.
- Salt while hot"Pounded salt" is simply salt crushed fine — the period alternative to today's free-running table salt. Apply it the moment the slices come out of the pan, while the surface fat will still hold it.
- The napkinA folded linen napkin in the serving dish was the Victorian way of absorbing residual grease and keeping the pile loose. A wire rack over a warm dish does the same job and lets steam escape, which is what actually keeps them crisp.
- YieldRoughly 1 lb of potatoes serves two or three as a side. They do not keep — eat them within a few minutes of frying.
Fried potato slices appear in English cookery books through the nineteenth century, often as a way of using up cold or surplus potatoes, in both thicker cuts fried soft and thin cuts fried hard like this one. The choice of dripping is telling — beef and goose fat were ordinary frying media in a household that roasted meat regularly, and goose dripping would have been a seasonal by-product worth saving. The direction to serve on a napkin belongs to the service conventions of the period; the book's insistence that they "cannot be dished nicely in any other way" is as much about the table as about the potato.