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Potatoes: Cover
Cover the saucepan and set back on the stove where it will not cook for five minutes. Serve in a vegetable dish sprinkled with the parsley.
Roasted Brown Potatoes.
Wash and pare potatoes, soak in cold water, boil for seven minutes, then remove from the kettle and lay in the gravy of a roast about half an POTATOES hour before the meat is to be taken from the oven. Baste with fat two or three times. Sweet potatoes may be cooked in the same way.
Chambrey Potatoes (French recipe).
Wash and pare potatoes, then cut into thin flakes on a vegetable slicer, soak for half an hour in ice water, drain, and dry in a towel. In an iron spider fry out a couple slices salt pork, cook 2 slices onion delicately brown, lift out the onion, then put in the potatoes, having the spider more than half full, season with pepper and salt and dot over the top with bits of butter. Set the spider back on the stove where there is moderate heat. Cover tightly until the potatoes are softened and brown. Occasionally, while cooking, turn them over to prevent burning.
Hongroise Potatoes (French recipe). 1 cupful scalded milk, 4 tablespoonfuls butter, 3 cupfuls potato cubes, 2 tablespoonfuls flour, teaspoonful salt, teaspoonful lemon juice, Dash McIlhenny's Tabasco Sauce.
Soak the potato cubes in ice water half an hour. Parboil three minutes, and drain. Put the butter in a spider, and sauté the potatoes delicately brown. Add the seasonings, dust on the flour, and pour in the hot milk; allow it to cook for a few minutes, then turn into a hot dish and sprinkle with shredded parsley.
Potatoes Brabanconne (French recipe).
Into 2 cupfuls mashed potatoes, stir a tablespoonful finely chopped chives, 1 teaspoonful chopped parsley, a dash pepper, teaspoonful salt, 2 teaspoonfuls butter, and a tablespoonful cream. Turn out on a platter, shape into a mound, dust over it grated cheese and stale bread crumbs.
Cover with bits of butter, and brown in the oven.
POTATOES WHICH ARE FRIED Saratoga Chips.
Pare potatoes, slice into thin shavings on a vegetable cutter, and allow to soak in ice water for an hour.
Lift from the water, dry in a towel, fry in deep fat or oil until they curl and are delicately brown. Shake as free from fat as possible before lifting frying basket from the kettle, and put to drain on absorbent paper.
Dust with salt. Be careful that the fat is not too hot, as the potatoes must cook before they brown, also allow the fat to reheat each time before frying another portion of potatoes. French Fried Potatoes.
Wash and pare potatoes, cut them into lengthwise strips, and soak an hour in ice water. Drain and dry, then fry in hot fat. When taken from the kettle, shake them on a sheet of brown paper to absorb the fat, and dust with salt. Be careful not to cook too many potatoes at a time, as the fat is apt to become chilled and the potatoes greasesoaked.
Fried Potato Balls. 2 cupfuls hot mashed potatoes, teaspoonful salt, 1 teaspoonful celery salt, Dash cayenne, 1 tablespoonful butter, 1 egg, 1 teaspoonful shredded parsley.
Into the hot potatoes beat the butter and seasonings. Allow it to cool for a few minutes, then add the parsley and egg. Whip with a fork until thoroughly blended, roll between the hands into small balls, dip in flour, fry in hot fat, and drain on brown paper.
Potato Croquettes.
Prepare mashed potatoes as for fried balls, adding a little onion juice and a dash McIlhenny's Ta- MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK basco, make into cork-shaped croquettes, roll in flour, egg, and finely sifted bread crumbs. Fry delicately brown in hot fat, then drain and absorb on paper.
Kartoffelklösse (German recipe). 3 cupfuls mashed potatoes, 1 cupful toasted bread crumbs, 2 eggs, Dash pepper, 1 teaspoonful salt, 1 tablespoonful chopped parsley, 1 teaspoonful nutmeg.
Beat the bread crumbs into the mashed potatoes, add the seasoning and parsley, moisten with the yolks of eggs beaten thick and lemon-colored. Whip the whites of eggs to a stiff froth, then blend with the potato. Mold into small balls and fry until delicately brown in hot fat.
A run of potato dishes from a section that assumes a coal range, a mandoline and a kettle of rendered fat. Most translate directly; a few of the quantities and vessels need a word.
- The spiderA spider is a cast-iron frying pan, originally with legs to stand over coals. Any heavy skillet works, and for the Chambrey potatoes a lid that seals well matters more than the metal.
- Vegetable slicer or cutterThis is a mandoline. For Saratoga chips aim for about 1/16 inch; for the Chambrey "flakes", slightly thicker so they hold together while they steam under the lid.
- The ice-water soak is not optionalEvery recipe here that starts from raw potato -- the Chambrey flakes, the Hongroise cubes, the Saratoga chips and the French fries -- calls for half an hour to an hour in ice water. It leaches surface starch, which is what keeps chips from sticking together and turning leaden. Drying them completely afterwards matters just as much: wet potatoes drop the fat temperature and spit.
- Fat temperatures"Hot fat" for French fries and croquettes is 350-375F. The warning about chips is sound and worth a number: start them nearer 325F so they cook through, and let the fat recover between batches rather than crowding the basket.
- Set back on the stoveOn a range, the back of the top plate was the cool zone. Read "set back where there is moderate heat" as low heat on a burner, or a 300-325F oven for the covered Chambrey pan.
- Browning in the ovenThe Brabanconne mound wants a hot oven, 425F, or the broiler for a few minutes. It is a gratin, and long baking only dries the mash out.
- The nutmeg in the KartoffelklosseA full teaspoon of nutmeg in three cups of potato is aggressive by current taste, and ground nutmeg that has sat in a tin is weaker than a freshly grated one. A quarter teaspoon, grated fresh, gives what the recipe is after.
- Hongroise potatoesDespite the name, there is no paprika in it. The flour and scalded milk build a thin bechamel around the sauteed cubes; add the milk hot and off the heat briefly, or it will seize into lumps.
- Salt pork and TabascoSalt pork is still sold, often near the bacon; unsmoked pork belly or a couple of rashers of streaky bacon substitute. McIlhenny's is simply Tabasco, then as now.
These pages come from Isabel Gordon Curtis's cookbook, published in the era when American home cooks were being taught to give plain vegetables French names. "Hongroise", "Brabanconne" and "Chambrey" here signal restaurant polish rather than any strict regional tradition, and the Kartoffelklosse is the one genuinely borrowed dish, though German potato dumplings are traditionally poached in simmering water rather than fried as they are here. Saratoga chips are the American entry: the thin fried slice is generally traced to the resort hotels at Saratoga Springs, New York, in the 1850s, and the story crediting the cook George Crum is repeated everywhere but rests on later recollection rather than contemporary record. By the time this book appeared the chip had left the resort entirely and become something a household made at home with a hand slicer and a kettle of fat, which is exactly how it is presented here.