Peel and remove the inside part of a pumpkin or marrow squash so that only the meat remains; cut two pounds of this into small sticks an inch and a half long, and three-eighths of an inch across; lay them in a vessel, strew salt over and let macerate for fifteen minutes, then drain, wipe and dip quickly in flour; plunge a few at a time into very hot fat; when cooked, drain, salt and dress on a napkin.
A straightforward fry that lives or dies on how dry the pumpkin is when it hits the fat. Ranhofer's salting step is not seasoning — it is drawing out water, and skipping it gives you limp, steaming sticks.
Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) drew on his years of cooking at Delmonico's in New York, and its vegetable chapters show how thoroughly French technique was applied to American garden produce. Pumpkin was abundant and cheap in the United States, more usually boiled, mashed or baked into pie; cutting it into bâtonnets and deep-frying it is the treatment a French kitchen gave potatoes and salsify, transferred wholesale to a native crop. Salting and macerating the pieces before frying draws off water. The name is purely descriptive — potiron is the French for pumpkin, bâtonnets the little sticks — and the neighboring entries for truffled potatoes and purslane give a fair sense of how wide a range of vegetables a restaurant of that rank kept on hand.