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Potato Chips
Pare 5 or 6 potatoes. With a sharp knife or potato cutter, cut in very thin slices, crosswise. Soak in cold or ice water 1/2 to 1 hour. Drain. Dry between towels and fry in deep hot Crisco until a delicate brown. It is best to use a fryer with a drain basket. Drain and sprinkle with salt.
Ruby Gorsline.
A sound method that needs only a thermometer and a number to become reliable. The single thing the original omits is the frying temperature.
- Fat temperatureThe recipe gives none. A workable range for chips is about 350-365F. Below that the slices absorb fat and go limp; much above it they brown before the interior water has cooked off.
- Crisco and substitutesCrisco was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, and it was promoted heavily by brand name to American home cooks in this period. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point -- peanut, canola, refined sunflower -- will do the same job here.
- Why the soak mattersThe half hour in cold water rinses surface starch off the slices so they fry separately instead of gluing into clumps. Change the water once if it turns cloudy.
- Dry them properlyThis is the hinge. Any water left on the slices will make the fat boil over the sides of the pan and will steam the chip instead of crisping it. Blot until the towels come away dry.
- ThicknessA mandoline set to about 1/16 inch, or the thinnest setting on a food processor slicing disc, gives the "very thin" the recipe wants. Uneven slices cook unevenly and some will scorch.
- Fry in small batchesA large handful at a time. Adding too many slices drops the fat temperature sharply, and the recipe's own advice about a drain basket is worth following — it lets you lift the whole batch out at once before the edges darken.
- Salt while hotSalt sticks to the film of fat only in the first few seconds out of the pan. Salt on a cooled chip falls off in the bowl.
- Yield and keepingFive or six medium potatoes give roughly 6 to 8 cups of chips, enough for six as a side. They stay crisp a day or two in a tin, not in plastic.
Fried potato slices were a restaurant and hotel item through the nineteenth century — the "Saratoga chip," traditionally traced to the resort kitchens at Saratoga Springs, New York, in the 1850s — and remained something you made at home rather than bought until commercial packaging and sealed bags spread in the 1920s and 1930s. That this recipe appears in a congregation's fundraising cookbook, over a contributor's name, puts it squarely in the period when a home cook still cut and fried her own. The specification of Crisco is telling: the shortening was introduced in 1911 and promoted hard to American housewives through recipe pamphlets and church-book advertising.