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Potato Fritters
Boil and peel the potatoes, grate or mash them, add 4 well-beaten eggs, a little cream, chopped parsley, chives, salt, and spice, and mix the whole well together. Drop a teaspoonful of this paste into a pan of boiling lard or butter, when it will swell into a light fritter. Or, take the mealy part of potatoes roasted; beat it in a mortar with a little fine salt, 1 spoonful of brandy, some fresh butter and cream. Mix the whole, adding gradually 1 well-beaten egg; shape the paste into small balls, which roll in flour, fry, and serve, sprinkled with powdered sugar.
Two versions of the same idea: a savoury dropped fritter and a sweeter fried potato ball. Neither gives a potato quantity, so the eggs are your guide to proportion.
- Quantity of potatoesThe original never says how many. As a starting estimate, four well-beaten eggs will carry something like 2 lb of boiled potatoes (about 4 medium) in the first version; the second, with one egg and no batter to hold, will take rather less. Judge by feel: aim for a paste stiff enough to hold its shape on a spoon.
- Dry potatoes are the hingeWet potato paste disintegrates in the fat. Boil the potatoes whole in their skins, peel while hot, and let the steam escape for several minutes before mashing or ricing. Add the cream a spoonful at a time and stop as soon as the mixture coheres.
- "Spice"Unspecified in the original. Nutmeg is the most likely reading, with mace or a little white pepper also plausible. A quarter teaspoon of nutmeg is enough for 2 lb of potato.
- Chives and parsleyBoth should be finely chopped and dry; shake wet herbs in a towel first. Scallion greens substitute for chives without complaint.
- Frying fat and temperature"Boiling lard" means fat at about 350-375F, not literally boiling. Butter alone will brown and burn at that heat, so use lard, or clarified butter, or a neutral oil. Fry a single test spoonful first: if it spreads or breaks up, work another spoonful of flour into the paste.
- Mortar workThe second version's pounding in a mortar is there to make the roasted flesh smooth. A ricer or food mill does it better; a food processor turns potato gluey and should be avoided.
- The brandyOne spoonful in the second version is for flavour, not leavening. Much of the alcohol cooks off in the fat, and the quantity is negligible in any case.
- Yield and servingTeaspoon-sized fritters from the four-egg batter will make a large quantity; fry in batches. Drain on paper and serve at once; they collapse as they cool. Powdered sugar suits the second version, which is closer to a sweet beignet, and is out of place on the herbed one.
Potato fritters belong to the long nineteenth-century project of finding respectable uses for the potato at the dinner table rather than only in the labourer's pot. Boiled or roasted potato beaten with egg, cream and butter and fried in small pieces appears under many names across European household books, from German Kartoffelkrapfen to the various "potato puffs" and "potato balls" of English and American manuals, and compendia of this kind often reprinted several such versions side by side without attribution. The two variants here show how fluid the line between savoury and sweet still was: the same paste takes parsley and chives in one paragraph and brandy and powdered sugar in the next, the deciding factor being whether it was headed for the meat course or the sweet. The instruction to beat the potato in a mortar reflects the equipment of the period, mortar and pestle being a standard means of smoothing cooked food.