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French Fried Potatoes
Wash and pare small potatoes, cut in eighths lengthwise, and soak one hour in cold water. Take from water, dry between towels, and fry in deep fat. Drain on brown paper and sprinkle with salt.
Care must be taken that fat is not too hot, as potatoes must be cooked as well as browned.
Farmer's instruction is short but the whole method hangs on one line: the fat must be cool enough to cook the potato through before the outside colours. Here is what that means in numbers.
- Fat temperatureFor a single-fry as written, hold the fat around 325-340F so the interior cooks before the surface sets. Modern practice usually splits this in two: 325F until limp and pale, rest, then 375F for a minute or two to crisp and colour.
- The cold-water soakThe hour in cold water rinses off surface starch, which is what makes fries stick together and brown unevenly. It is not optional, and neither is the drying — water carried into hot fat spits violently and drops the temperature.
- Cut size"Small potatoes cut in eighths lengthwise" gives wedges rather than shoestrings. Something in the region of 1/2 inch at the widest point on a modern potato will give a roughly similar result.
- Which potatoA dry, mealy potato — russet or another high-starch baking type — fries best. Waxy new potatoes hold moisture and go leathery rather than fluffy inside.
- Deep fatThe period cook would most likely have used beef suet or lard, both of which are still excellent here for their high smoke point and flavour. Peanut, sunflower or refined vegetable oil works equally well; keep at least three inches of depth and fry in small batches so the temperature does not crash.
- Brown paperBrown paper of the grocer's-bag or butcher's-paper sort was a common drain. Use a rack set over a sheet pan instead — paper towel underneath traps steam and softens the crust.
- SaltingSalt the instant they come out of the fat, while the surface is still oily enough to hold it. Salted fries do not keep; serve them straight away.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity; roughly 2 lb of potatoes will serve about four as a side.
Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896) belongs to the moment when deep frying moved from a professional trick to something a careful home cook could manage, and her caution about the fat not being too hot is the tell — without a thermometer, judging heat by the shimmer of the fat or a test cube of bread was a skill in itself. Fried potatoes in this style are generally traced to Belgium and northern France, and reached English-language cookbooks in the nineteenth century under names like "French fried" and "chip potatoes." The "French" is sometimes explained as referring to the lengthwise cut — to "french" something — rather than to any nation, but this is a folk etymology and the origin of the name is not settled. Farmer's insistence on soaking, drying, draining and salting at the right moments is characteristic of her whole approach: she was writing for pupils who needed the order of operations spelled out, not for cooks who had learned at a mother's elbow.