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Potato Chips
Slice raw potatoes, cover with cold water, and let soak over night. Drain dry between towels and fry in frying basket in hot fat about ten minutes. Drain and sprinkle with salt. Care must be used when lowering the basket into the hot fat, as the potatoes contain so much water it causes violent ebullition.
A straightforward deep-fried potato crisp, written before home thermometers were common. The instructions leave out the two numbers that decide success: slice thickness and fat temperature.
- Slice thicknessThe recipe does not say how thin to cut; something on the order of 1/16 inch is what this style of chip wants. Anything much thicker will brown outside before the centre dries, and the result is a chip that goes limp as it cools.
- Why the overnight soakCold water pulls surface starch off the slices so they fry separate rather than gluing into a raft, and it keeps them from greying. A couple of hours does most of the work; overnight is fine if the water is kept cold, and worth changing once.
- Drying is the hingeEvery point of this recipe turns on getting the slices genuinely dry. Blot between towels, then let them air a few minutes. Wet potatoes are what cause the "violent ebullition" the original warns about, and they also steam rather than crisp.
- Fat temperatureAim for 350-360F. Hotter and the slices colour before the moisture is driven out; cooler and they absorb fat. Use a thermometer and let the fat recover between batches.
- Ten minutes is a full basketThat timing likely assumes a fuller basket than most cooks would use now, which drags the fat temperature down. Thin slices in a modest batch will be done in three to five minutes, once the loud bubbling quiets and the colour is pale gold. Work in small loads.
- The fat itselfThe recipe says only "hot fat"; in 1907 that would most often have been lard, beef drippings or a lard-cottonseed compound. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point works; peanut, sunflower or refined vegetable oil all behave much the same way here.
- Salt while hotSalt immediately out of the basket, on a rack or paper, while the surface film of fat will still hold it. Salted after cooling, most of it falls off.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. About 1 1/2 lb of potatoes will serve four as a side. They are best within an hour or two and do not keep well in a covered dish.
Fried potato slices appear in English and American cookbooks well before this one — Eliza Leslie gives them in her 1837 Directions for Cookery, and earlier English versions, such as Kitchiner's, predate her — and the name "Saratoga chips," after the New York resort town, is documented in print in the United States from the later nineteenth century, though the popular story crediting a single cook with their invention there is traditional rather than documented. By the time the Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907, the dish was standard household fare and the frying basket was a common piece of kitchen equipment, which is why Maria Willett Howard can assume one without explanation. What dates the entry is the warning at the end: deep frying at home meant a kettle of rendered fat on a coal or gas range with no thermostat and no thermometer, and a boil-over was something the cook was told to guard against. Chips as a commercial packaged product were only beginning in this period; making them was still kitchen work.