Home › Left-Over Vegetables › Chopped Potatoes
Chopped Potatoes
Chop cold boiled potatoes fine and season well with salt and pepper. Heat a pan and melt in it one or two tablespoonfuls bacon fat or dripping.
II2 When the fat is hot turn in the potatoes, smoothing them evenly in the pan. Cover with a tin, let them steam a few minutes, set on one side of the stove, and brown slowly. Turn over like an omelet and serve on hot platter. Stewed potatoes may be warmed over in this way, but do not chop them.
A hash-brown cake made from yesterday's boiled potatoes. The whole thing hinges on leaving the pan alone long enough for a crust to set.
- The stray "II2"That is a page number (112) picked up by the scanner, not an instruction or a quantity. Ignore it.
- Heat and stove position"Set on one side of the stove" is wood-range language for moving the pan off the hottest plate. On a modern burner, start at medium-high to melt the fat and set the bottom, then drop to medium-low for the slow browning.
- DrippingBacon fat or beef dripping both work as written; either gives the flavour the recipe is counting on. The recipe gives one or two tablespoonfuls and no pan size; in a large skillet the upper figure is the safer choice. Any neutral oil plus a knob of butter will do if you have no rendered fat.
- Cover with a tinA pie tin or plate inverted over the pan. Any lid works; the recipe's stated purpose is to let the potatoes steam a few minutes before browning.
- TimingFigure five minutes covered to steam through, then 10 to 15 minutes uncovered over lower heat for the crust. Do not stir or shuffle the pan during the browning stage or the cake will not hold together when you flip it.
- Cold potatoes onlyThe recipe specifies cold boiled potatoes; fully cooled ones chop cleanly, where still-warm potatoes tend to break down under the knife.
- The flip"Turn over like an omelet" most likely means folding or sliding the cake out onto the hot platter so the browned face shows, rather than tossing it in the pan. Loosen the edge with a thin spatula first.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; scale the potatoes to whatever pan you have and expect a side dish for three or four from about a pound of cooked potato.
Left-over cookery was a whole genre in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a household bought and boiled potatoes in quantity. The technique here — chop, press into hot fat, steam under cover, then brown undisturbed — is closely related to the American hash-brown cake. The closing note about stewed potatoes is the practical heart of the entry: potatoes already softened in liquid will not hold up to chopping, so the recipe directs that they be warmed over whole.