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Chipped Potatoes
Take some long-shaped potatoes, peel them and smooth them with the knife. Cut them into very thin rounds. Heat the grease pretty hot, dry the slices of potato with a cloth, put them into the frying basket and plunge them into the fat. When they are colored, take the basket out, let the fat heat up again to a slightly higher temperature, and re-plunge the basket, so that the slices become quite crisp. Serve with coarse salt sprinkled over.
A double-fried potato crisp, written for a cook who owned a wire frying basket and judged fat by eye. The essential point is the two stages, which the original states clearly but without numbers.
- The double fryThe original gives no numbers: the first pass is at a moderate heat that colours the slices without hardening them, the second at a distinctly hotter fat to drive off surface moisture and set the crispness. Modern practice for chips puts these somewhere around a moderate and then a high frying heat. Going straight in at the higher heat tends to darken the outside before the slice has dried out.
- "Grease" and "fat"The original does not specify which. Belgian frying tradition favours beef fat, and blanc de boeuf is still sold in blocks in Belgium. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point works, though beef fat gives a different, characteristic flavour.
- Slice thickness"Very thin rounds" probably means something in the region of 1/16 inch, the sort of cut a mandoline gives. At that thickness both fryings are short, and the slices should be judged by colour and sound rather than by the clock.
- Long-shaped potatoesA floury or all-purpose variety such as Russet or Bintje, chosen for shape so the rounds come out even. Waxy salad potatoes hold too much moisture and stay limp.
- Drying the slicesThe instruction to dry them with a cloth is the difference between crisp potatoes and a pan that boils over. Wet slices also cool the fat sharply, which is why the recipe has you reheat between stages.
- Coarse saltSalt at the moment they leave the fat, while the surface is still hot enough for it to stick. Once cool it slides off.
- YieldNo quantity is given; two large potatoes would make an accompaniment for about four. Fry in small batches; a crowded basket steams rather than fries.
Belgium's claim to fried potatoes is old and fiercely held, and the double-frying method described here is the technique that Belgian cooks still regard as non-negotiable, whether for thin rounds or the thick frites sold from street stalls. The Belgian Cook Book was compiled in Britain during the First World War, when some quarter of a million Belgian refugees were living there after the German invasion of 1914; the recipes were gathered from those exiles, and the proceeds are generally said to have gone to relief work. A dish this plain earns its place in such a collection precisely because it was everyday food, the kind of thing a household cook could describe from memory without a written measure anywhere in it.