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Irish Potato Chips
Shave the raw potatoes with a cabbage cutter. Drop the pieces, one at a time, into boiling lard, and fry a rich brown. Sprinkle a little salt over them.--Mrs. R. L. O.
A three-line recipe that assumes you own a cabbage cutter and a kettle of lard. The technique is sound; only the equipment and the fat need translating.
- Cabbage cutterA wooden slaw board with a fixed blade, a close relative of the mandoline. A mandoline or the slicing disc of a food processor gives the same thin, even shave, which is the whole point: uneven slices burn at the edges before the centres crisp.
- "Irish potato"In nineteenth-century Southern books this distinguishes the ordinary white potato from the sweet potato, which was often just called "potato." No special variety is meant, though a starchy baking potato crisps better than a waxy one.
- One at a timeThe instruction is not fussiness. Slices dropped in a clump stick together and steam rather than fry. Add them loose and in small batches, and keep the pan from crowding.
- Fat temperatureThe original says only "boiling lard." Lard has no boiling point in any useful sense; what is meant is fat hot enough to bubble vigorously the moment a slice hits it — around 350–375F. Lard still works well here, as does any neutral high-smoke-point oil.
- Rinse and dryNot in the original, but worth doing: rinsing the shaved slices removes surface starch, and drying them thoroughly on a towel prevents the fat from spitting and the chips from bonding to each other.
- "A rich brown"Probably a little darker than most modern commercial chips, and closer to golden-amber than mahogany. They will crisp further as they cool, so pull them a shade before they look done.
- Salt timingSprinkle the moment they leave the fat, while the surface is still greasy enough to hold it. Salt added after they cool slides off.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity; two large potatoes would make a generous bowl for four as a side or snack. They keep their crispness only a few hours and do not reheat well.
Fried potato shavings appear in English and American cookbooks well before the commercial potato chip existed, and by the 1870s versions like this one were common household fare. The familiar story crediting the chip to a single cook at Saratoga Springs in the 1850s is traditional rather than documented, and recipes of this kind were circulating on both sides of the Atlantic independently. What dates this particular entry is the equipment: the cabbage cutter was a fixture of a Virginia kitchen that put up slaw and kraut. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was assembled from contributions by some 250 Virginia housekeepers, which is why the recipe carries initials rather than an author's name.