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Potatoes (Water boil five minutes drain)
water, boil five minutes, drain. Then put them in a fryingpan a few at a time. Sink them in a pan of smoking hot fat and fry a golden brown. When done, drain, sprinkle with salt and serve as a garnish to boiled or baked fish, or serve plain for breakfast.
The page opens mid-sentence, but the method is complete enough to follow: potatoes are parboiled, drained, then deep-fried until golden. It is the two-stage frying that later cookbooks would formalise, arrived at here by instinct.
- The hinge: dry themBetween the drain and the fat, the potatoes must be bone dry — spread on a towel or left in the hot empty pan a minute to steam off. Wet parboiled potatoes will spit violently and stew rather than crisp.
- "Smoking hot fat"Take this as a period figure of speech, not a target. Fat that is genuinely smoking is past its smoke point and breaking down; 350–375°F is the working range, tested with a thermometer or by a cube of bread browning in about a minute.
- "A few at a time"The instruction is doing real work. Crowding the pan drops the fat temperature and the potatoes absorb grease instead of sealing. Fry in small batches and let the fat come back up between them.
- Five minutes of boilingThat suits potatoes cut to a chip or small-cube size. Larger pieces need longer — the parboil should leave them tender at the edge and still firm at the centre, or the exterior will colour before the inside cooks.
- The frying pan and the fat panThe wording is ambiguous: the text names a frying pan and then 'a pan of smoking hot fat', which may be two vessels or one described twice. Either way the fat must be deep enough to sink the potatoes. A heavy saucepan filled no more than a third with oil serves today.
- Fat to useThe original most likely meant beef dripping or lard, which give a distinctly savoury result, though the text specifies only 'fat'. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point works, and dripping is worth trying with the fish it is meant to garnish.
- Salt timingSalt the moment they leave the fat, while the surface is still glossy, so it adheres. Salting before frying draws out moisture and softens the crust.
- QuantityNo yield is given. Reckon on one medium potato per person as a garnish, two as a breakfast dish.
Fried potatoes appear increasingly in English and American cookbooks through the nineteenth century as frying in deep fat became more common in domestic kitchens. The pairing suggested here -- fried potatoes alongside boiled or baked fish -- anticipates the later fish-and-chips pairing, though in a book of this sort the potatoes are still framed as a garnish, something arranged around the fish rather than heaped beside it. Parboiling before frying answers a practical problem long before anyone described it in terms of starch gelatinisation: a potato taken raw to hot fat browns before it is cooked through.