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Potatoes, Allumettes
Peel and wash three good-sized, sound, raw potatoes and carefully cut them into match-like strips. Wash again, drain well, then place in a wire frying basket and fry them in boiling fat for five minutes, or until they attain a golden colour. Lift them up, drain thoroughly, sprinkle over them a light teaspoon salt and serve on a hot dish.
A straightforward matchstick fry. The original leaves out the two things that decide whether it works: the temperature of the fat and how dry the potatoes are going in.
- Dry them completelyAfter the second wash the strips must be blotted bone dry in a towel. Surface water drops the fat temperature, steams the potato and gives limp, oil-logged strips rather than crisp ones.
- "Boiling fat" means 350-375F"Boiling fat" is not literal -- fat does not boil; the phrase is period shorthand for fat hot enough to bubble vigorously around the food. In modern terms that is somewhere around 350-375F (175-190C); the higher end suits a single short fry of strips this thin, the lower end if you fry once and take them only to colour.
- Five minutes is long for allumettesCut properly — about 1/8 inch square — they colour in two to three minutes. Five minutes at frying heat will take them past golden into bitter brown. Go by colour, as the recipe's own "or until" allows.
- Potato choiceA starchy or all-purpose potato (russet, Maris Piper, King Edward) crisps; waxy salad potatoes stay dense and greasy. Three good-sized potatoes is roughly 1 1/2 lb.
- Fry in batchesA wire basket crammed full drops the fat temperature sharply and the strips weld together. Fry in two or three loads and let the fat recover between them.
- Salt at the last momentSalt the moment they leave the fat, while the surface is still hot and slightly oily, and only then. Salted potatoes standing about draw moisture and soften.
- YieldServes three to four as a side, and they will not hold — allumettes are at their best within a few minutes of draining.
Allumette is simply French for match, and the cut is named for its resemblance to a matchstick — thinner than the pommes frites of a bistro plate, thicker than the wispy pommes paille or straw potatoes. The family of named potato cuts (allumette, paille, pont-neuf, gaufrette, chip) is best attested as a systematic vocabulary in professional French texts of the turn of the twentieth century, when precise knife work was a mark of a trained cook, and much of that vocabulary found its way into English-language cookbooks aimed at ambitious households. Its appearance in a volume called The International Cook Book is characteristic: French terminology gave an everyday fried potato the standing of restaurant cooking. The recipe's brevity seems to assume a good deal of unstated knowledge — perhaps that a kettle of fat was kept and reused, and that the cook could judge heat by eye.