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To Clarify Drippings
Drippings accumulated from different cooked meats (except mutton, which has a strong flavor), can be clarified by putting all into a basin and slicing into it raw potato, allowing it to boil long enough for the potato to brown, which causes all impurities to disappear. Remove from the fire, and when cool drain into basin and set in a cool place.
A thrift technique rather than a dish: it turns the mixed fat left in roasting pans into a clean cooking fat. The potato works by adsorption and by driving off water, and the whole thing depends on watching the pan.
- The hinge: dry the fat, do not fry the potatoThe fat must reach a temperature where the water in it steams off and the potato slices slowly brown, drawing particles and off-flavours to themselves. If the potato blackens the fat is scorching and will taste burnt; pull it before that point.
- Expect violent spatteringRaw potato is mostly water going into hot fat. Add the slices to warm rather than smoking fat, stand back, and use a deep pan filled no more than a third.
- "Basin"In this period a basin is simply a bowl or a deep pan, not a specific vessel. Use a heavy saucepan for the boiling and a heatproof bowl for the strained fat.
- Strain properlyThe recipe says drain; do it through a fine sieve lined with muslin or a coffee filter while the fat is still liquid but not hot enough to burn. Any meat solids left behind are what make dripping go rancid and sour.
- Why mutton is excludedMutton fat carries branched-chain fatty acids that survive clarifying, so it will flavour everything cooked in it. Keep it in its own jar if you keep it at all. Modern lamb fat is milder, since these compounds build up with the animal's age, but it still carries some of the same character.
- "A cool place" means the refrigeratorThe cool larder assumed here does not exist in most homes. Clarified drippings keep about three months refrigerated and much longer frozen; discard any that smells sharp, cheesy or crayon-like.
- Yield and useUse -- It is a good high-heat fat for frying potatoes, searing, and pastry in savoury pies, and its smoke point sits comfortably above butter's.
- An easier alternativeMelting the drippings with an equal volume of water, cooling, and lifting the solid cake of fat off the top does much the same cleaning with no spattering. The potato method is faster if you want the fat back the same day.
Dripping was too valuable to throw away in a household that roasted meat regularly, and books of this era treat it as a standing kitchen asset rather than a by-product: it fried the morning potatoes, greased the cake tins, shortened the pie crust and, spread on toast with salt, made a supper in its own right. Cooks kept a dripping jar or basin on the shelf and topped it up after every roast, which is exactly why clarifying mattered — mixed fat from a dozen different dinners, full of meat juice and browned scraps, turns rancid fast, and the potato trick was one of several household methods (bread crusts and hot water were others) for pulling those impurities out. The instruction to keep mutton separate is a small piece of practical taste-memory that has largely dropped out of print. Dripping's near-disappearance from American kitchens tracks the rise of cheap commercial vegetable shortening and, later, of vegetable oils in bottles; it survived longer in Britain, where it is still sold in tubs.