Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Chip Potatoes
Chip Potatoes
Wash and peel a dozen or so of rather small potatoes and divide them into pieces resembling a section of an orange and place them in a basin of water; then remove, dry them on a cloth, put them in a fryingpan with melted fat to a trifle more than half their height and allow them to fry until they are partly done and commence to float; then skin out the potatoes and set the pan over a fiercer fire, and when the fat becomes smoking hot, again place the potatoes in it and fry until the pieces blow themselves out and are quite brown; then take them out, drain off all the liquor, dust over with salt, and serve in a vegetable dish.
A two-stage fry, written before anyone owned a thermometer. The whole recipe hinges on the gap between the two fryings.
- The hinge: two temperaturesThe first fry cooks the potato through without colour; modern practice puts that at roughly 300-325F, with the second fry, which sets and browns the outside, at roughly 375-400F. Doing it in one go gives you wedges that are dark outside and raw at the centre.
- "Commence to float"This is the doneness cue for the first fry, and it is a good one. Potatoes rise as internal moisture turns to steam and lowers their density, which signals the interior is softening; the recipe calls them 'partly done' at this stage. Lift them out at that point, not after.
- "Blow themselves out"Oscar is describing puffing, as in pommes soufflées. It depends on an unbroken, faintly set skin from the first fry trapping steam in the second. Thick orange-section wedges puff unreliably at best; expect a blistered surface rather than a hollow balloon, and do not treat failure to puff as a fault in your technique.
- Drying the potatoesThe soak in water rinses off surface starch; the cloth is not optional. Wet potatoes drop the fat temperature sharply and spit.
- Depth of fat"A trifle more than half their height" means shallow frying in a wide pan, with turning. A deep pan filled no more than a third of the way is easier to control and safer, since the fat will foam up when the potatoes go in.
- The fatA period kitchen used beef dripping or lard, which is worth trying for flavour. Any neutral oil with a smoke point above 400F works; the recipe's "smoking hot" is a warning sign in modern fats, not a target.
- "Drain off all the liquor"Liquor here is simply the fat clinging to the potatoes. Drain on a rack rather than paper so the undersides stay crisp, and salt immediately while the surface is still hot enough to hold it.
- YieldA dozen small potatoes serves about four as a side. Fry in batches; crowding the pan is the usual reason they come out limp.
Oscar Tschirky was never technically the chef of the Waldorf — he was the maître d'hôtel — but his 1896 Cook Book collected the hotel's repertoire, and this is a plain American rendering of a French restaurant trick. The two-bath fry that makes potatoes swell is generally traced, in kitchen lore, to a French railway banquet in the 1830s where a delayed train forced a cook to pull his potatoes from the fat and return them later; the story is repeated everywhere and documented nowhere. "Chip" in this period covers a wide range of fried potato shapes, closer to the British sense than to the modern American crisp, and Oscar specifies an orange-section cut.