Home › Vegetables › French Fried Potatoes
French Fried Potatoes
Wash and pare potatoes and cut into eighths lengthwise. Dry between towels and fry in deep fat. Drain on soft paper, sprinkle with salt and serve in an uncovered dish. The fat must not be too hot, as the potatoes must be cooked as well as browned.
A four-line recipe that assumes you already know how to manage a kettle of fat. The one thing it does tell you — keep the fat moderate — is the hinge, and it is worth reading twice.
- Fat temperatureThe warning against fat that is "too hot" is the whole recipe. A single fry at around 325-340F cooks the interior through while colouring the outside slowly; above 375F the surface sets and browns before the centre is done. Modern practice splits the difference by frying twice, once at 325F to cook and once at 375F to crisp, but the single moderate fry described here works if you are patient.
- Cut sizePotatoes cut into eighths lengthwise are wedges, not the thin sticks the name suggests today. Expect chunky pieces roughly an inch across at the widest from a medium potato — thicker than a restaurant fry, and correspondingly slower to cook through.
- DryingDrying between towels is not fussiness. Surface water drops the fat temperature and spits violently; wedges that go in wet will steam rather than brown.
- Which potatoesThe book does not specify, but a floury variety — russet, King Edward, Maris Piper — gives the dry, fluffy interior this method is aiming at. Waxy salad potatoes stay dense and slightly greasy.
- Deep fatAt this period that meant lard or beef suet. Any neutral oil with a smoke point above 400F does the same job; use enough that the potatoes float freely and fry in batches so the temperature does not crash.
- Draining and serving"Soft paper" is a paper towel or a brown paper bag. The instruction to serve in an uncovered dish matters — a lid traps steam and the crust goes limp within a minute or two.
- YieldNo quantity is given. Reckon one large potato per person as a side dish, salted the moment they come out of the fat while the surface is still hot enough to hold it.
Deep-fried potatoes reached American cookbooks through French practice — the name in English-language books of this era is usually "French fried" or simply "Saratoga chips" for the thin-sliced version, the latter often traced to the resorts of Saratoga Springs in the 1850s, though the story is traditional rather than documented. Household manuals of this kind were published by pattern and magazine companies for a readership cooking on coal or early gas ranges without thermometers, which is why the temperature guidance arrives as a description of behaviour rather than a number. Frying in a deep kettle of rendered fat was ordinary domestic technique at the time, since lard and suet were cheap by-products of household or butcher's meat.