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French Fried Potatoes
1½ pounds Irish potatoes Salt Mazola Scrape and pare the potatoes and cut lengthwise into long strips, about sixteen to a potato. Rinse, dry on a towel, put in a frying basket and fry in deep Mazola hot enough to brown a bit of bread in a minute and a half, 325 degrees F. Drain on paper, dust with salt and serve.
A single-fry method from a corn-oil promotional cookbook. It works, but a few terms and one temperature deserve comment.
- MazolaCorn oil, then as now, and the book exists largely to sell it. Any neutral oil with a smoke point above 400F — peanut, canola, sunflower — behaves the same.
- Irish potatoesOrdinary white potatoes, so named to distinguish them from sweet potatoes in American usage. Use a starchy variety such as russet; waxy potatoes stay dense and greasy.
- The bread testA cube of bread browning in a minute and a half indicates a fairly gentle fat. The recipe's own figure of 325F is the reliable one; use a thermometer and treat the bread as a backup.
- One fry or twoAt 325F the strips cook through but come out pale and soft-edged. Modern practice often calls for two fries: once at about 325F to cook the interior, then a second, brief pass at 375F to crisp and colour. The book's single fry gives a limp chip by current standards.
- Drying mattersThe instruction to rinse and dry on a towel is the hinge. Surface starch causes sticking and surface water causes violent spattering; the strips should be genuinely dry before they meet the oil.
- Batch sizeAdding too much potato at once drops the oil temperature and the strips absorb fat instead of shedding it. Fry in batches that the basket holds in a single loose layer.
- SaltingSalt immediately out of the fat, while the surface is still oily enough to hold it. Salting later mostly ends up on the plate.
- YieldA pound and a half of potatoes serves three to four as a side dish.
This comes from a manufacturer's cookbook, a genre that flourished in the early twentieth century when refined vegetable oils were still novelties competing against lard, butter and beef suet. Mazola, a corn oil, was introduced by the Corn Products Refining Company in the 1910s, and booklets like this one existed to persuade cooks that a neutral, odourless oil could do everything animal fat did. Deep-fried potato strips were an obvious showpiece: the technique had come to American tables from France in the nineteenth century — Thomas Jefferson's household is often cited, though the evidence is thin — and by the early twentieth century "French fried" was being applied more broadly to foods cut small and cooked in deep fat, onions among them.