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Potato Curls
Wash and pare large long potatoes. Shape with a potato curler, soak one hour in cold water, drain, dry between towels, fry in deep fat, drain, and sprinkle with salt.
A four-line recipe that assumes a tool almost nobody owns and an unstated fat temperature. Both are easily supplied.
- The potato curlerA small hand tool that pared a continuous spiral ribbon off a whole potato. A spiral vegetable slicer, or a swivel peeler worked around the potato in a long unbroken strip, comes closest to the same effect. Thin ribbons, on the order of 1/16 inch, crisp rather than toughen.
- Choose the right potatoLong, high-starch potatoes are what the recipe means: russets or another baking potato. Waxy red or new potatoes will not fry crisp and are hard to cut in a long ribbon.
- Why the hour in cold waterThe soak leaches surface starch, which keeps the curls from gluing to each other in the fat and slows browning before they are cooked through. The recipe's full hour is not fussiness; a shorter soak does less.
- Dry them properlyThis is the hinge. Wet ribbons drop the fat temperature and spit violently. Blot between towels until they feel dry to the hand, then fry in small batches.
- "Deep fat" means a numberThe book gives none. Use 375F. Below about 350F the curls absorb fat and go limp; much above 385F the thin edges scorch before the centre sets. They take roughly 2 to 3 minutes and should be pale gold, not deep brown.
- Fat choiceFannie Farmer's kitchen would have used lard or a vegetable shortening. Peanut, canola or sunflower oil behaves the same and is easier to bring back to temperature between batches.
- Salt and timingSalt the instant they leave the fat, while the surface is still oily enough to hold it. Curls do not keep well and soften fairly quickly once cool.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity; two large potatoes will produce enough for a garnish for several plates. Curls of this kind were generally used as a trimming rather than as a serving of potatoes in their own right.
Potato curls belong to the late-nineteenth-century fashion for cutting potatoes into shapes, helped along by the kitchen gadgets of the period: curlers, ribbon cutters, ball scoops and crinkle blades. The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book carries several related recipes nearby, Saratoga chips among them, each a variation on the same technique of thin cut, cold soak, and deep fat, distinguished largely by the tool used. The appeal was visual: a plain roast could be dressed up with something ornamental that cost almost nothing, which suited a book written for middle-class households running on one servant or none. Deep frying at home became more practical in this period as ranges and rendered fats became more widely available, and the fried-potato garnish remained a mark of a well-set table into the twentieth century.