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Sweet Fried Potatoes, German Style
Peel four large, raw sweet potatoes, and with a three-quarter-inch potato column cutter cut out as many as you can, Slice them in one-sixth-inch-thick pieces, place in a frying basket, then fry in boiling fat for ten minutes. Lift up, drain on a cloth, dress on a dish with folded napkin and serve.
A simple deep-fried sweet potato dish whose only real difficulty is the equipment it assumes and the frying time it gives.
- The column cutterA potato column cutter is a sharpened metal tube, much like an apple corer, used to bore cylinders out of a raw vegetable so the slices come out uniform rounds. An apple corer or a 3/4-inch round cutter does the same job; failing that, square the potato off and slice it into coins of roughly that width.
- Slice thicknessOne-sixth of an inch is about 4 mm, thin but not chip-thin. A mandoline set just above its thinnest notch gives it consistently; hand slicing will do if you keep the coins even, since ragged thicknesses will burn and undercook in the same batch.
- "Boiling fat"Fat does not boil; the phrase means fat hot enough to bubble vigorously when food goes in, roughly 350-375F. Period kitchens used lard or beef drippings, both of which still work well here, as does peanut or another neutral high-smoke-point oil.
- Ten minutes is far too longCoins this thin are done in three to four minutes, and sweet potatoes carry enough sugar to darken and turn bitter well before ten. Pull them when they are deep gold at the edges and just yielding at the centre.
- Soak and drySweet potato slices hold surface starch and moisture that make them spit and stick together. A rinse in cold water followed by a thorough pat dry gives crisper edges and a calmer pan.
- Fry in batchesA crowded basket drops the fat temperature and steams the potatoes soft. Work in two or three loads and let the fat come back up to heat between them.
- SeasoningThe recipe seasons nothing, and salt may simply have been left to the table. Salt them the moment they leave the fat, while the surface is still hot enough to take it.
- The folded napkinDressing fried food on a napkin-lined dish was standard service of the period: the linen absorbs residual fat and keeps the pieces from sliding. A paper-lined platter does the same and is easier to launder.
- YieldFour large sweet potatoes, once cored into cylinders, give perhaps a third of their weight in usable coins; call it a side dish for four, with a good deal of trim left over for mash or soup.
Sweet potatoes are a New World crop, domesticated in tropical America and carried into Europe in the sixteenth century, where they never took hold in German cooking to anything like the extent they did in the American South. National labels in the big international compendia of the early 1900s were often applied loosely, attached to a shape, a garnish or a method rather than to any traceable regional dish, and "German style" here most plausibly points to the uniform cut coins and the plain fat frying rather than to a recipe from a German kitchen. What the entry does record accurately is the professional restaurant practice of its day: specialist cutters for standardising vegetables, a frying basket rather than a skillet, and service on a folded napkin.