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Potato Fritters
Peel and grate into a bowl three medium, sound raw potatoes, add two tablespoons flour, two raw eggs, half teaspoon chopped parsley, half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons white pepper, one saltspoon grated nutmeg and one saltspoon baking powder. Sharply mix with wooden spoon until well amalgamated. Heat two tablespoons melted lard in a large black frying pan, then drop the preparation in the pan in twelve equal cake forms and slowly fry six minutes on each side. Remove, drain on a cloth, then dress on a hot dish and serve.
A plain grated-potato pancake, close kin to the latke and the rösti in construction. The measurements are period shorthand but the method survives intact.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So the pepper comes to half a teaspoon, and the nutmeg and baking powder to a quarter teaspoon each.
- Grate and use at onceRaw grated potato oxidises to grey-pink within minutes. Have the eggs, flour and seasonings measured before the potatoes touch the grater, and mix immediately.
- Squeeze out the waterThe recipe does not say to, but three grated potatoes will release a good deal of liquid, and wet batter steams rather than browns. Wring the gratings in a towel, then let the starch settle out of the drained liquid and scrape it back into the bowl.
- The black frying panAlmost certainly heavy iron, and the instruction matters: a thick pan holds an even heat that a thin one will not, which is what lets the cakes cook through without scorching.
- FatTwo tablespoons of lard for twelve cakes is lean. Lard still fries beautifully, but any neutral oil with a high smoke point works, and you may need to add more between batches.
- Six minutes a sideThat is only reasonable at genuinely moderate heat with cakes pressed thin, and it is what cooks the raw potato through. If the outside is dark before six minutes, the pan is too hot and the centres will be chalky.
- YieldTwelve small cakes, enough for four as a side dish. Drain on paper rather than cloth and hold them in a 250F oven in a single layer if you are frying in batches.
The book is Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906); Filippini spent decades at Delmonico's in New York and wrote in the confident, telegraphic style of a professional feeding a dining room. Grated raw potato bound with egg and a little flour is one of those preparations that turns up wherever potatoes and frying fat meet — the Jewish latke, the Swiss rösti, the German Kartoffelpuffer, the Irish boxty — and Filippini's version, with its parsley, white pepper and grating of nutmeg, is squarely in the Franco-German hotel idiom rather than any one home tradition. The nutmeg is the tell: it was the standard seasoning for potatoes, spinach and cream sauces in professional kitchens of the period, used in quantities small enough to be felt rather than tasted.