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Potatoes, O'Brien
Cut four good-sized, well-washed, peeled sound potatoes into one-third-inch-square pieces, wash again and drain. Plunge in boiling fat and fry for ten minutes, lift up, drain well, place them in a frying pan with one tablespoon melted butter, three sweet red peppers cut in small squares and half teaspoon salt; lightly brown for ten minutes, frequently tossing meanwhile, pour into a hot dish and serve.
A straightforward two-stage fry: blanch the potatoes in deep fat, then finish them in butter with sweet peppers. The main thing the original leaves out is the temperature of the fat.
- Fat temperatureThe first frying is a blanch, not a browning — hold the fat at about 325F so the cubes cook through and go pale gold in the stated ten minutes. Any hotter and the outsides colour before the centres are done.
- Dry them properlyAfter the second washing, drain and pat the cubes thoroughly dry. Wet potatoes dropped into hot fat spit violently and steam rather than fry.
- "Sweet red peppers"At this period the phrase means fresh sweet peppers or bottled pimientos, not chilli. Three of them is a lot of pepper for four potatoes; two red bell peppers, or a drained 4-oz jar of pimientos, gives the colour the dish is known for without swamping it. If using jarred pimientos, add them near the end since they are already soft.
- One tablespoon of butterBarely enough to coat a pan of potatoes. Two or three tablespoons, or butter with a little of the frying fat, browns them more evenly.
- The second ten minutesThe recipe calls for frequent tossing; toss rather than stir, and let the cubes sit still for a stretch between tosses, since constant agitation keeps the crust from forming and breaks the potatoes down into hash.
- OnionMost later versions of this dish include onion, which the original omits entirely. A small onion in fine dice, added with the peppers, is faithful to the way the dish is now understood.
- Frying vesselA period "frying pan" for this job means heavy cast iron or steel. Non-stick will not give the same crust; use cast iron if you have it.
- YieldFour large potatoes serve three to four as a side dish. Serve at once — these do not hold, and the peppers release moisture as they sit.
Potatoes O'Brien belong to the American hotel and chophouse repertoire of the turn of the twentieth century, when a cook could put an Irish surname on a dish of fried potatoes flecked red and green and expect diners to recognise it; the naming is often said to have begun in Boston or New York restaurant kitchens of that era, but this is folk attribution and no single originator is documented. The recipe is set down in the compressed, single-paragraph style of a professional writing for other professionals, alongside other restaurant dishes carrying national or personal labels. The red pepper is the period detail worth noticing: pimientos appear as a decorative note in otherwise plain food in many recipes of the 1900s and 1910s, though cheap large-scale domestic canning in the United States dates only from the Georgia industry of the 1910s.