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Fried Sweet Potatoes
Peel four medium-sized, sound, round, sweet potatoes. Cut them into one-third-inch-thick slice, then cut each slice into one-third-inch strips. Plunge them in hot, but not boiling, fat for ten minutes. Lift them up with the skimmer. Thoroughly boil the fat, then plunge in the potatoes again and fry for three minutes longer. Remove them with the skimmer and thoroughly drain on a cloth. Dress on a hot dish with a folded napkin and serve.
This is a classic two-stage fry, written before thermometers were standard kitchen equipment. Getting the two fat temperatures right is the whole recipe.
- The two temperaturesThe recipe gives no numbers. "Hot, but not boiling" fat is usually read as somewhere around 300-325F: the strips should sizzle steadily without browning. "Thoroughly boil the fat" for the second plunge suggests a much hotter fat, in the region of 375-400F, hot enough to crisp the surface immediately. Fat does not literally boil at frying heat; the phrase describes the vigorous bubbling that rising moisture causes.
- Ten minutes is generousThird-inch strips will usually be tender through in 5-7 minutes at the lower heat. Test one: it should bend without snapping. Overcooking at this stage leaves the interior collapsing during the second fry.
- Rest between friesThe recipe implies it but does not say it: let the drained strips cool and dry for at least 10 minutes before the second plunge, and ideally longer. Surface moisture is what prevents crisping.
- Sugar burnsSweet potatoes brown far faster than white potatoes because of their sugar content. Three minutes at high heat is about right, and watching them is more use than watching the clock.
- "Round" sweet potatoesThe word may simply be asking for evenly shaped tubers that slice neatly rather than naming a variety; the recipe does not say. Any orange-fleshed variety sold as a sweet potato or yam in a US supermarket works; the drier white and purple varieties fry crisper but taste less sweet.
- FatPeriod cooks used lard, beef suet or clarified drippings. Peanut, sunflower or refined vegetable oil behaves the same way and holds 400F without smoking.
- SeasoningNo salt is mentioned anywhere in the recipe. Salt them the moment they leave the fat, while the surface is still slick.
- The folded napkinServing fried food on a folded linen napkin was standard formal practice; the cloth absorbs residual fat. A rack or paper does the same job and keeps the underside crisp.
- YieldFour medium potatoes serve four as a side dish. They do not hold: serve within a few minutes of the second fry.
Sweet potatoes reached European kitchens from the Americas well before white potatoes did, but in nineteenth-century Europe they remained a curiosity. The method itself is pure French frying practice, of a kind often associated with professional kitchens of the period: blanch in moderate fat, rest, then finish in very hot fat, the same two-stage technique behind pommes frites and souffl potatoes. In the American South, where sweet potatoes were a staple field and garden crop rather than an import, they were far more often baked in ashes, boiled, or candied with sugar and butter; frying them in strips reads as a continental treatment applied to a familiar vegetable. The instruction to dress the finished potatoes on a folded napkin is generally taken as a marker of the period.