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Potatoes, Fried
French kidney potatoes are the best for this purpose. Wash and peel some potatoes, and cut them from the breadth (not the length) in slices as thin as a shilling. As they are sliced throw them into cold water, and keep them there until wanted. When they are to be fried dry them carefully in a napkin, and throw them--a few at a time--into as much boiling fat as will cover them entirely. The fat may be known to be boiling when it ceases to hiss, and is still. Move the potatoes about in the fat that they may be equally cooked, and when they are brightly browned on both sides and crisp, put them on a cloth or on brown paper before the fire to drain the grease from them, sprinkle a little salt over them, and serve very hot. Fried potatoes are good with steaks or chops, or may be even served by themselves as a breakfast dish. Cold boiled potatoes may be sliced and fried in the same way, but the slices should be cut a quarter of an inch thick. Time to fry, about eight minutes. The best and easiest way of frying potatoes is to put them a few at a time into a frying basket and fry in boiling fat.
This is a crisp rather than a chip: slices cut across the potato, thin as a coin, fried once until brittle. The instructions hold up well, but two details need translating.
- "As thin as a shilling"A Victorian shilling was roughly a millimetre and a half thick, so these are wafers. A mandoline on one of its thinnest settings gets you there; knife-cut slices will be uneven and will brown at different rates.
- French kidney potatoesA waxy, kidney-shaped type of the period; the modern waxy salad potatoes are the nearest thing on sale now, though the identification is not exact. Any firm waxy potato works for thin crisps.
- Fat that "ceases to hiss"Fat does not boil at frying temperature — the hissing is residual water in the fat cooking off, and silence means it has gone. It is a real test, but a vague one. Use a thermometer: 350-375F for thin raw slices.
- The drying is the hingeSlices go into cold water to rinse off surface starch, which is why they crisp rather than stick together. But any water carried into the fat makes it spit violently and steams the potato soft. Dry them thoroughly between towels before they go anywhere near the pan.
- A few at a timeCrowding drops the fat temperature and the slices absorb grease instead of crisping. Fry in small batches and let the fat come back up to temperature between them.
- Eight minutesThis probably suits the thicker slices of cold cooked potato rather than the wafers. Paper-thin raw slices at 350-375F should be done in two to four minutes; take them out when the bubbling slows and they are pale gold, as they darken further off the heat.
- DrainingBrown paper before the fire has been replaced by a wire rack over a tray, which is better: paper traps steam underneath and the undersides go limp. Salt immediately, while the surface is still hot enough to hold it.
- QuantityReckon on one medium potato (about 6 oz) per person as a side dish, rather more if they are being eaten on their own at breakfast.
Thin fried potato slices spread through English cookery in the second half of the nineteenth century, plausibly on the back of French practice: hence the French kidney potato specified here, and hence the frying basket, recommended here as "the best and easiest way". The distinction the recipe makes, between slicing across the breadth for wafers and cutting cold boiled potatoes a quarter-inch thick, might be read as the fork in the road between what became the crisp and what became the chip; at this date both were simply "fried potatoes" and the same paragraph covered them. Commercially bagged crisps were still decades off, so a cook wanting them had to stand over a pan of dripping. The suggestion that they might be served alone as a breakfast dish is a reminder of how substantial a Victorian breakfast table was expected to be.