No. 2787

Potatoes Fried and Channeled

Pommes de Terre Cannelees Frites

Put some frying fat (No. 55) in a pan provided with a wire basket. Peel raw potatoes, cut them in slices with a channeled knife, having each one about an inch and a half in diameter and three-sixteenths of an inch thick; throw them into cold water immediately, soak for one hour, then drain; put them into a wire basket, and plunge into the warm frying fat; then cook, keeping them at the same degree of heat, stirring about several times; when done and nicely colored, drain, wipe, salt and dress in a pyramid.

← No. 2786 Potatoes, Parisienne Potatoes & Sweet Potatoes No. 2788 Potato Fritters →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's crinkle-cut chips, from The Epicurean (1894). The recipe is short because the book assumes you have already read its frying chapter; the details that matter are all in the cutting and the fat temperature.

The hinge: one temperature, start to finishRanhofer says to plunge into "warm" fat and keep it "at the same degree of heat" — a single moderate frying, not the modern blanch-and-refry. He gives no figure; a moderate heat that lets the slices cook through and colour in one go is what is wanted, and they will be crisp but not blistered. Adding cold potatoes drops the fat sharply, so fry in small batches.
A channeled knifeThis is a crinkle or waffle cutter, still sold as a corrugated garnishing knife or mandoline blade. The ridges are the whole point: they hold more surface area and crisp more aggressively than a flat slice.
The dimensions are exact for a reasonAn inch and a half across and three-sixteenths thick (about 5 mm) is thick enough that the ridges survive the fat and thin enough to cook through before the outside darkens. A mandoline with the ridged blade gives consistent thickness far faster than a knife.
"Frying fat (No. 55)"Ranhofer's No. 55 is a rendered frying fat prepared elsewhere in the book; this page does not say what goes into it. Any neutral fat with a high smoke point works: beef tallow, lard, refined peanut or sunflower oil.
The hour-long soakNot fussiness. Soaking raw slices in cold water pulls out surface starch so they do not glue together in the basket and fry cleaner. Drain and dry them thoroughly before they go anywhere near fat — wet potatoes make the fat erupt.
Wipe, then saltRanhofer drains, wipes and salts in that order. Salting on absorbent paper immediately out of the fat, while the surface is still hot, is what makes it stick; salt added after they cool slides off.
YieldThe recipe gives no quantities or number of servings. Serve at once — the "pyramid" dressing is a period plating convention and holds heat poorly, so it goes to the table straight from the pan.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York for most of three decades, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete record of the restaurant's kitchen, and the potato section runs to dozens of numbered variations that differ only in how the tuber is cut: Parisienne balls, straw, soufflées, châteaux, and these cannelées, or channeled. That proliferation reflects the logic of French garnish cookery, in which the shape of the potato identified the dish it accompanied as reliably as any sauce. The ridged cutter itself was a standard piece of the nineteenth-century garnishing kit, used on carrots, beets and butter as well as potatoes, and the crinkle-cut chip is still a familiar sight in freezer cases today. Ranhofer describes a single-temperature fry here, though two-stage frying was also understood in the nineteenth century — pommes soufflées depend on it.