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Potatoes, Fried, Garnish Of
Cut the potatoes into any fanciful shapes, wash them, drain them on a cloth, and then melt an ounce of butter, and pour it over them. Put the potatoes in a stewpan large enough to allow them to lie clear of one another. Toss them about every two or three minutes till they are brightly browned, and serve immediately.
A garnish rather than a side dish: small shaped potatoes browned in butter in a single layer. Two things decide whether it works — the potatoes must be bone dry, and they must not be crowded.
- Dry them properlyWashing removes surface starch, but any water left on the potato will steam rather than brown and will spit in the hot butter. Drain on a cloth as directed, then pat dry a second time just before the butter goes on.
- "Stewpan" means a sauté pan"Stewpan" here means a stovetop pan, not a casserole -- Victorian stewpans were metal pans used on top of the stove; whatever the exact form, the recipe's own requirement is width, since the pieces must "lie clear of one another." Use a heavy skillet or sauté pan wide enough that every piece touches the base with space around it; two pans are better than one crowded one.
- An ounce of butter is 2 tablespoonsThat is enough to coat perhaps a pound of small shapes, no more. Butter alone will brown and then burn at this heat — clarified butter, or butter with a spoonful of neutral oil, holds up better over the time the browning takes.
- Heat and timingThe recipe gives neither heat nor total time; only the instruction to toss every two or three minutes until brightly browned. Moderate heat suits it. Small dice or balls the size of a hazelnut cook through as they colour; anything much thicker is easier if parboiled briefly and dried first.
- The shapes"Fanciful shapes" is left entirely open; in practice this would mean balls, olives, dice or other small forms cut with a vegetable scoop or small cutters. Cut them all to one size — mixed sizes will give you some raw and some scorched in the same pan.
- SeasoningThe recipe gives none. Salt at the end rather than the start; salt early draws out moisture and slows the browning.
- Yield and useA pound of potatoes cut this way garnishes four to six plates. They soften within minutes of leaving the pan, which is why the instruction to serve immediately is not a formality.
Cassell's belongs to the long Victorian and Edwardian fashion for cutting vegetables into decorative shapes to ring a joint or a fish — a habit inherited from French professional kitchens, where a number of potato cuts were known by shape (noisette, parisienne, olivette) as much as by cooking method. Garnish recipes of this kind, which assume both a scoop or set of cutters and the time to use them, become much less common in domestic cookbooks after the First World War.