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Fried Potatoes
There are various ways of preparing potatoes for frying or sauteing. Cold, boiled potatoes made into cakes can be dipped in flour and sauted in butter. Parboil potato balls. Dip in hot fat and fry delicate brown. Cut potatoes in slices, cubes or latticed slices. Fry in deep fat. Drain on brown paper and serve at once. Use vegetable scoop for cutting small potato balls. Use the waste for creamed potatoes or run through ricer after cooking in salted water. Salad can be made of the pieces after they have been drained and cooled.
This is less a single recipe than a page of methods for frying potatoes, with no quantities or temperatures given. A few specifics fill the gaps.
- Fat temperatureFor deep frying, 350-365F browns slices and cubes without a raw center. Lattice-cut and very thin slices do better at 375F, where they crisp before absorbing much fat.
- Parboiling the ballsScooped balls need only 4-5 minutes in salted boiling water, then thorough draining and drying. Wet potatoes dropped into hot fat spit and steam rather than brown.
- "Sauted" cakesCold boiled potato mashed or chopped, bound only by its own starch, holds together best if pressed firm, chilled, then floured. Cook over medium heat and leave the cakes alone until a crust forms, or they break apart when turned.
- DrainingBrown paper was the standard drain of the period. A wire rack over a sheet pan is better, since paper traps steam under the potatoes and softens the crust.
- Rinsing and dryingRinsing cut potatoes removes surface starch, which keeps slices from sticking together; dry them completely afterward. For a very crisp result, cooks often fry twice, once at lower heat to cook through and again hot to color.
- The wasteTrimmings left from scooping balls are worth keeping, as Mrs. Wilson says. Boiled in salted water they go to creamed potatoes or through a ricer; the fried scraps, cooled, take dressing well for potato salad.
- Vegetable scoopWhat is meant is a scoop of the melon-baller or parisienne type; the recipe specifies only that the balls be small, and such scoops were sold in a range of sizes. A scoop of about an inch is a workable choice, giving balls that parboil and fry evenly.
- YieldReckon about 6 oz of raw potato per person as a side dish, and more if the potatoes are being cut into balls, since scooping leaves a considerable quantity of trimmings -- which is why the recipe tells you what to do with them.
Mrs. Wilson wrote in the years around the First World War, when American home economics was preoccupied with using every scrap of food, and the closing lines here are the giveaway: the trimmings from potato balls become creamed potatoes, riced potatoes or salad. Potato balls cut with a scoop, called pommes parisienne in the professional kitchens of the period, were a hotel and restaurant flourish that magazines and cookbooks were busy translating for households without a brigade of cooks. The lattice-cut slices call for a corrugated or waffle-blade cutter, a gadget of the era. That a single short entry runs through several methods suggests it reads less as step-by-step instruction than as a reminder for a cook who already knew how to fry and needed only the idea.