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Potatoes Fried in Butter
Peel some raw potatoes, and cut them into thin slices. Fry them in butter over a hot fire, continually turning them, until they become sufficiently brown. Let them drain; then arrange them on a hot dish, sprinkle salt over them, and serve.
A single-pan potato dish with no quantities and no timings, which puts the whole thing on technique. The slicing and the pan temperature decide whether you get crisp rounds or a soggy heap.
- Slice thickness"Thin" is all the recipe gives; around 1/8 inch works well, thin enough to cook through before the outside burns but thick enough to hold together as you turn them. A mandoline or the slicing side of a box grater gives more even results than a knife, and evenness matters more than absolute thinness.
- Dry the slices firstThe recipe does not mention it. Rinse off surface starch, then pat the slices thoroughly dry; wet potatoes drop the butter's temperature and steam rather than brown.
- Butter will burn"A hot fire" plus whole butter is a narrow window, since butter's milk solids scorch around 300F. Use clarified butter or ghee if you want a genuinely hot pan, or keep the heat at medium and accept a longer, gentler browning.
- Do not crowdA single layer, turned continually, is what the instruction assumes. Two or three batches in a 10-inch pan beats one crowded panful, which will stick and steam.
- TimingFigure 10 to 15 minutes per batch over medium heat for slices that are golden and tender through. They are done when a slice offers no resistance to a knife tip and the edges have gone crisp.
- DrainingDrain on a rack rather than paper if you can; paper traps steam under the slices and softens the crust you just built.
- Salt at the endSalting before or during frying draws out moisture and works against browning. Sprinkle after draining, while the surface is still hot enough to hold the salt.
- YieldNo quantity is given. Reckon on one medium potato per person as a side dish, roughly 1 1/2 lb for four, with 3 to 4 tablespoons of butter.
The recipe is a demonstration of shallow frying in butter, using the cheapest available raw material. Victorian and Edwardian cookery writers are often said to have drawn a line between potatoes cooked this way and those plunged into deep fat, the latter sometimes appearing under French names such as pommes frites. Frying in butter over direct heat would also have suited the coal range, where a pan set over an open plate could be pushed hotter or cooler by moving it, and where a deep kettle of fat was a more serious undertaking. The absence of quantities seems characteristic of the genre; a dictionary of cookery expected a cook who could judge a panful by eye and needed only to be told the order of operations.