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Potato Fritters
Peel six large crisp potatoes, cut fine or grind in a meat-chopper. Have ready a paste made by mixing one cup of flour, one teaspoon salt, one teaspoon baking powder, and milk enough to have paste about consistency of muffins. Fry in deep fat or lard, drain on brown paper, place in dish in hot oven and sprinkle with parsley. An egg improves them.
— Mrs. Van Buren
A grated-potato fritter batter with almost no proportions given for the potato itself. The hinge is moisture: raw grated potato sheds water fast, and that water is what decides whether these fry or steam.
- Wring the potato dryAfter grinding or grating, squeeze the potato hard in a towel and discard the liquid. Wet potato thins the batter and drops the fat temperature, which is how fritters turn greasy and pale.
- QuantitiesSix large potatoes is roughly 2 1/2 to 3 lb, which is a great deal of potato for one cup of flour. Expect to fold the batter through the potato as a binder rather than dipping the potato in it, and add a little more flour if it will not hold a spoonful together.
- "Consistency of muffins"A thick drop batter that falls from the spoon reluctantly, not a pourable one. Milk quantity is left to the cook; start with about 2/3 cup and adjust.
- Fat temperatureDeep fat should be 360-375F. Below that the fritters absorb lard; above it the outside colours before the potato inside is cooked through. Fry in small batches of three or four.
- DonenessGrated raw potato needs three to four minutes per batch, and the fritter should be deep gold. A pale fritter will taste starchy and raw in the middle.
- The eggTake the suggestion. One egg beaten into the batter binds the shreds and keeps the fritters from breaking up in the fat; reduce the milk slightly to compensate.
- Brown paper and hot ovenPaper towel does the draining. The receipt says a hot oven and a dish, but a low oven (around 200F) is safer for merely holding the fritters, and setting them on a rack rather than piling them in a dish keeps steam from undoing the crust.
- YieldAbout 18 to 20 fritters from this quantity, enough for six as a side dish. Salt again as they come out of the fat.
Fritters of this kind sit between two traditions: the flour-batter fritter of English and American cookery, and the grated-potato cake of German and Central European households. Community cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are full of them because potatoes were cheap, kept all winter in a cellar, and could be stretched with a cup of flour and a little milk. Baking powder in the batter suggests a date after commercial chemical leavens came into general use, from the 1870s and 1880s onward. Named attributions such as 'Mrs. Van Buren' are typical of community cookbooks, many of which were compiled as subscription fundraisers.