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French Fried Potatoes
Pare and cut potatoes into long even pieces. Put into cold water for about an hour. Drain and dry well. Fry in deep fat until brown and cooked through; drain on unglazed paper. Salt just before serving.
Sweet potatoes may be prepared in same way.
A bare-bones frying method that assumes the cook already knows how deep fat behaves. Two things the original leaves out matter more than anything it says: the temperature of the fat, and frying in small batches.
- Fat temperatureThe recipe gives none. Modern practice is 325-340F for the first stage and 375F to finish; a single pass at 350-360F works for thin cuts. Below about 300F the potatoes absorb fat and go limp, and at the top of the range many fats begin to smoke -- animal fats and shortenings well before refined vegetable oils do.
- Fry in batchesAdding too many potatoes at once drops the fat temperature sharply and steams them instead of frying. Keep the batches small and let the fat recover between them.
- Why the cold soakThe hour in cold water rinses surface starch, which is what makes cut potatoes stick to each other and colour unevenly. It is genuinely useful, not fussiness, and it also keeps the cut pieces from greying.
- Dry well means dryThis is the hinge of the recipe. Wet potatoes going into hot fat cause violent spattering and boil-over. Blot them thoroughly in a towel; the surface should feel dry to the hand.
- Unglazed paperPeriod kitchens drained fried food on brown grocery paper, which absorbs where glazed or waxed paper does not. Paper towels or a wire rack over a sheet pan do the same job, and the rack keeps the undersides crisp.
- The fat itselfA book of this kind would most likely have meant beef suet, lard or a vegetable shortening. Peanut, canola or refined sunflower oil all hold the temperature and are neutral in flavour.
- SaltingSalt just before serving is correct and worth honouring; salt drawn onto hot fried potatoes early pulls moisture to the surface and softens the crust.
- Sweet potatoesThey contain far more sugar and brown well before they are cooked through. Fry them thinner and at the lower end of the range, closer to 325F, and expect a softer result than white potatoes give.
- YieldFigure one medium potato, about 6 oz, per person as a side dish; two if the fries are the point of the plate.
Deep-fried potato batons reached English-language cookbooks through France in the nineteenth century, and the name stuck as "French fried" long before the shortened "French fries" became standard American usage. The "French" in the phrase is often said to refer to the style of cutting rather than to any single French cook or city, though this is a popular explanation rather than a settled one. Their appearance in a promotional cook book of this period, plainly and briefly, tells you the dish had already stopped being a novelty: the compiler needed only to give the shape and the soak. The suggestion to treat sweet potatoes the same way reflects how routinely American household books of the era paired the two.