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Potato Fritters (Cups hot riced potatoes)
2 cups hot riced potatoes 2 tablespoons cream 2 tablespoons wine 1 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup flour Few gratings nutmeg Few grains cayenne 3 eggs Yolks 2 eggs Add cream, wine, and seasonings to potatoes; then add eggs well beaten, having bowl containing mixture in pan of ice-water, and beat until cold. Add flour, and when well mixed, drop by spoonfuls in deep fat, fry until delicately browned, and drain on brown paper.
A light egg-rich potato batter fried in deep fat — closer to a savory beignet than a croquette. The two things that decide success are the ice-water beating and the fat temperature.
- Why the ice-water bathHot potato plus beaten egg will scramble if left standing, and warm batter slumps and spreads in the fat. Setting the bowl in ice water while you beat firms the mixture so it holds a rounded spoonful.
- Riced potatoesBake or boil floury potatoes (russets), then push them through a ricer or food mill while hot. Two cups riced is roughly 1 lb of raw potato. A food processor makes them gluey and the fritters heavy.
- The eggsThe list calls for 3 whole eggs plus the yolks of 2 more, five eggs in all for 2 cups of potato, though two of them contribute yolk only. The eggs are what makes the fritters puff. Eggs of the period are often said to have run smaller than today's large; medium eggs are a reasonable choice.
- "2 tablespoons wine"The wine is unqualified; in a savory dish of this period it most often meant sherry or Madeira, and dry sherry is the safest reading. It is a seasoning here, not a liquid measure that matters much.
- Deep fat temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature; cooks of the period judged frying fat by how fast a cube of bread browned in it. Use 365-375F. Below that the fritters soak; above it the outside colors before the egg has set and they collapse.
- Frying in batchesDrop by rounded tablespoons, no more than five or six at a time, and turn them once. They take about 3 minutes and swell noticeably. Let the fat come back up to temperature between batches.
- Brown paperBrown paper was the standard drain of the period. Paper towels or a wire rack over a sheet pan do the same job; a rack keeps the undersides crisper.
- Yield and servingAbout 20 to 24 fritters, enough for six as a side. Serve immediately, as they deflate as they cool. The recipe itself says nothing about what to serve them with.
This recipe's phrasing -- "few grains cayenne," the draining on brown paper, the riced potato -- is that of the Boston Cooking-School tradition associated with Fannie Farmer. Fritters of this type -- riced potato bound with egg and lightened by beating cold, then deep-fried -- belong to the French-influenced side of late nineteenth-century American cooking, where a starch was expected to arrive at table transformed rather than merely boiled. The splash of sherry and the gratings of nutmeg are conventional genteel seasonings of the period, used to lift a plain vegetable into something fit for a dinner course.