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Ribands, Potato
Peel four or five large potatoes. Throw them into cold water for a few minutes, and dry them with a cloth. Cut them round and round into thin strips or ribands till the centre is reached, and fry them in plenty of boiling fat until they are brightly browned. Drain them well, sprinkle a little pepper and salt over them, and serve very hot. Time to fry, eight to ten minutes. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A spiral-cut chip, closer to a modern curly fry than to a crisp. The whole trick is in the cutting and the fat temperature.
- Cutting the ribandHold a peeled potato and pare round it in one continuous strip, as you would peel an apple, working inward to the core so the ribbon is unbroken. A swivel peeler gives thin, even ribbons; a spiralizer with a flat blade does the same job faster. The recipe asks only for thin ribbons; too thick and the centre stays raw.
- Dry them properlyNote the order: the potatoes go into cold water whole and peeled, before cutting, which keeps them from discolouring while you work. Drying is not optional: wet potato in hot fat spits violently and steams rather than browns.
- "Boiling fat"Fat does not boil; the phrase means fat hot enough to bubble furiously the moment food enters, roughly 350-375F. The recipe does not name a fat; dripping or lard would have been the usual household choice, but any neutral oil with a high smoke point works. Use enough depth that the ribbons float free.
- Eight to ten minutes is for the batch, not the ribbonEight to ten minutes -- A thin ribbon browns in nearer two to four minutes, so the original's eight to ten is longer than a single ribbon needs. Fry in small batches and pull them when they are deep gold, not before and not much after.
- SaltingSeason the instant they come out of the fat, while the surface is still oily enough to hold the salt. Salting cold fried potato mostly puts salt on the plate.
- DrainingA wire rack beats paper: paper traps steam under the ribbons and softens the undersides within a minute or two.
- YieldFour or five large potatoes serving three or four is generous by modern standards for a side dish, and about right if these are the whole of a snack.
Deep-fried potato in decorative cuts was a display of knife skill as much as cookery — the same instinct that produced gaufrette, matchstick and shaving cuts, each with its own name. The ribbon cut also made economical use of a cheap vegetable: one potato, pared in a single spiral, yields a striking heap on the dish. Frying at home appears to have grown more common through the later 1800s as ranges became more reliable and rendered beef fat was cheap, and fried potatoes in some form were a familiar dish by the time this dictionary appeared.