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Potatoes, Demidoff
Peel and wash eight medium, sound potatoes; plunge them in two quarts boiling water with a teaspoon salt for twenty minutes; drain and slice them into very thin slices, then fry in boiling fat five minutes. Lift up, drain on a towel, dredge a half teaspoon salt over them. Dress on a hot dish and serve.
A two-stage potato: boiled whole, then sliced and fried. The whole thing turns on how far you take the first stage.
- Do not fully cook the boilTwenty minutes at a rolling boil can leave medium potatoes soft enough that very thin slices break up under the knife. Take them to just-tender-at-the-edge, roughly 10-12 minutes for a 6-ounce potato, then cool them before slicing. Chilled parboiled potatoes slice cleanly.
- "Boiling fat"Fats do boil, but far above any frying temperature; the bubbling is water leaving the food. The phrase means fat hot enough to bubble furiously when food goes in, around 360-375F. Use a thermometer and a neutral fat with a high smoke point. At lower temperatures the slices absorb oil and go limp rather than crisp.
- Thin means thinAbout 1/8 inch, or a mandoline setting just above a chip. Uniform thickness matters more than absolute thinness, since ragged slices burn at the edges before the centres colour.
- Five minutes is a ceiling, not a ruleAlready-cooked slices only need to colour. Work in small batches so the fat does not drop in temperature, and pull them at even gold; two to four minutes is common.
- SaltingThe half teaspoon goes on while the slices are still glossy with fat, which is when salt sticks. Salting before frying draws out moisture and causes spitting.
- DrainingA towel works, but a rack over a tray keeps the undersides from steaming soft. Do not cover them or pile them deep.
- YieldEight medium potatoes serve four to six as a side dish. Serve at once; these do not hold.
The Demidoffs were a Russian industrialist family raised to the nobility on Urals iron and copper, and by the middle of the nineteenth century their Paris and Florence households were conspicuous patrons of French cooking; Anatole Demidoff, styled Prince of San Donato, is the member usually credited when the name appears on a menu. A cluster of garnishes and dishes bearing the name entered the classical French repertoire in that era, the best known being Escoffier's poularde Demidoff with its turned vegetables. As with most such dedications the link to any particular kitchen is traditional rather than documented, and by the time a book like this one collected it the name had become little more than a label for a certain elegance: here, plainly, boiled potatoes sliced thin and crisped in deep fat, which is a good deal humbler than the pedigree suggests.