Home › Vegetables › French Fried Potatoes
French Fried Potatoes
Pare small raw potatoes, divide in halves, and cut each half in three pieces; cover with boiling water and let stand three minutes. Drain dry between cloths, and cook in frying basket in hot fat ten minutes. Drain, sprinkle with salt, and serve.
A single-fry method from a period when deep fat was measured by eye. Two numbers will carry it: the fat temperature and the moisture on the potato.
- Fat temperature"Hot fat" in a book of this vintage means roughly 350-365F for a single fry, tested by a bread cube browning in about a minute. Below 325F the pieces absorb grease; above 375F they colour before the interior softens.
- The hinge: dry them properlyThe three-minute soak in boiling water acts as a partial blanch, and the drying between cloths is what keeps the fat from boiling over. Wet potatoes dropped into hot fat spit violently and steam themselves soggy.
- The cutSmall potatoes halved and each half in three gives thick wedges, not matchsticks. Ten minutes suits that size; cut them thinner and they will be done in four or five.
- Which potatoA floury or all-purpose variety - russet, Maris Piper, King Edward - fries far better than a waxy new potato, which stays dense and slightly translucent inside.
- Fry in batchesThe recipe assumes a deep kettle and a wire basket. Crowding drops the fat temperature sharply, so work in batches small enough that the potatoes float freely, and let the fat come back up between them.
- Fat to useThe original would most likely have meant lard or beef drippings. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point works; beef fat gives a flavour closer to the period.
- Salt timingSalt the moment they leave the basket, while the surface is still hot and faintly oily, or it will not adhere.
- YieldNo quantity is given. Reckon about 1/2 lb of potatoes per person as a side dish.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and it set its confectionery chapters alongside a full general household repertoire - hence a vegetable section carrying deep-fried potatoes. The name "French fried" has sometimes been traced not to France as a place of origin but to the verb to french, meaning to cut into lengthwise strips, though the rival explanation - fried in the French manner - is at least as commonly cited, and American cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s use "French fried" for onions and other vegetables treated the same way. The two-stage approach here - a brief hot-water bath, then the fry - might be read as an anticipation of the modern double-fry logic, though the water stand is not itself a fry, and the cook of 1907 was working over a coal or gas range with a kettle of lard and no thermometer, judging the fat by the way a scrap of bread behaved in it.