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French Potato Fritters
Beignets de Pomme de terre.
Potato puree and eggs beaten light and fried. Hors d' auvre, (side dish) or vegetable garnish for entress, or sweet entremet with brandy sauce. 1 1/2 pounds of pared raw potatoes. 4 ounces of flour. 4 tablespoonfuls of cream. Same of white wine or sherry. 6 whole eggs and 4 yolks. Juice of half a lemon. Nutmeg.
Boil the potatoes well done in salted water, drain dry and mash them thoroughly--better through a colander. While still warm, mix in all the other ingredients except the flour. Then set the pan or bowl in ice-water and beat the mixture 15 minutes or more, like making sponge cake. When light stir in the flour. Fry small spoonfuls, egg-shaped, in hot lard. Drain on paper. Serve hot. Makes about 50. Not hollow, but very light.
A very egg-rich potato batter that rises on beaten egg alone — there is no baking powder and no yeast, so the beating stage is the whole recipe. Everything else is straightforward.
- The hinge: beat over iceFifteen minutes of beating with the bowl set in ice water is what makes these light; the cold keeps the warm potato from setting the eggs while air is worked in. A stand mixer with a chilled bowl will get there sooner than by hand — judge by the batter, which should be pale and mousse-like and hold a soft ribbon, rather than by the clock.
- Flour goes in last, gentlyFold the 4 oz (a scant cup) of flour in by hand after the batter is light. Beating it in deflates the foam and gives you dense, heavy fritters.
- Potatoes1 1/2 lb pared raw potatoes means peeled weight. Use a starchy variety — russet or Idaho — and dry them well over low heat after draining. Waxy potatoes hold water and make the batter slack. Pressing through a colander, as directed, or a ricer avoids the gluey texture a food processor produces.
- EggsSix whole eggs plus four yolks reads as intentional rather than a misprint. Eggs of the period may have run smaller than a modern large, so a scant measure is arguably closer to the original. Ten yolks' worth of fat is what keeps the interior custardy rather than hollow.
- Frying fat and temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature, only "hot lard"; for fritters this is usually taken as somewhere in the region of 350-375F. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point works. Fry a test spoonful first: too cool and the batter drinks fat, too hot and the outside colors before the egg sets inside.
- "Entress" and "entremet"A typesetter's mangling of entrées. Entremets covered the dishes served after the roast, savoury as well as sweet — hence the recipe specifying a sweet entremet, with the brandy sauce turning the same batter into a pudding-course fritter.
- Yield and servingAbout fifty small egg-shaped fritters, so figure 8-10 people as a side or garnish. They collapse as they cool; fry in batches and serve immediately rather than holding them in a warm oven.
- The wine measureFour tablespoonfuls each of cream and white wine or sherry is a small amount for this quantity of potato — enough to loosen and flavor, not to thin. Resist adding more liquid if the puree seems stiff; the eggs will slacken it as you beat.
Beignet simply means a fritter, and by the late nineteenth century the French repertoire had a beignet for nearly everything — apple, salsify, cheese, bone marrow. The potato version belongs to the same family as pommes dauphine, where a potato puree is lightened and fried, though here the lift comes from long-beaten whole eggs rather than choux paste. The instruction to beat the bowl over ice "like making sponge cake" tells you where the technique was learned: the sponge method is what gets air into a batter and keeps it there. The note that the fritters are "not hollow, but very light" is a professional's distinction, marking them off from the hollow, puffed beignet soufflé a customer might otherwise expect. The three-way serving suggestion — appetizer, vegetable garnish, or sweet course with brandy sauce — shows how flexibly a single well-made batter could be used.