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Fried Whole Potatoes
Peel and boil in salted water, remove from the fire as soon as done so that they will remain whole; have ready one beaten egg and some rolled bread or cracker crumbs and fry in butter until a light brown, or drop in hot lard. This is a nice way to cook old potatoes.
A simple crumbed potato: boiled whole, egged, breaded and fried. The whole thing hinges on the potatoes holding their shape, so treat the boiling as the critical step rather than the frying.
- Stop the boiling early"Remove from the fire as soon as done" is the instruction that matters. Test with a skewer at the centre and lift them out the moment it slides in with slight resistance; a minute past that and they slump when handled. Drain and let them steam dry in the pan off the heat.
- Choose the right potatoUse waxy or all-purpose potatoes of even, smallish size (roughly 2 in.) so they cook through without collapsing. Floury baking potatoes will crack open and shed their coating in the fat.
- Making the crumbs stickThe potatoes must be dry and no more than warm before they go into the egg. A light dusting of flour first, then beaten egg, then crumbs gives a coating that will not slide off in the pan. Chilling the breaded potatoes 15 minutes helps further.
- "Rolled" crumbsRolled bread or cracker crumbs would have been stale bread or crackers crushed with a rolling pin — finer and drier than fresh breadcrumbs and closer to modern dried crumbs than to panko.
- Fat and temperatureButter alone can brown and burn before the crust sets; clarified butter, or butter with a spoonful of neutral oil, holds up better. For the lard option, bring it to 350–375°F and fry 2–3 minutes until the crust is set and coloured — the potato is already cooked.
- "Old potatoes"This means the previous season's storage potatoes, sweeter and softer by late winter, before spring crops arrived. The egg-and-crumb coating masked their flabbiness. Any potato that has gone soft or sprouted heavily should simply be discarded now.
- Yield and servingFigure 2–3 potatoes per person as a side.
Crumbed and fried boiled potatoes belong to a large family of late nineteenth-century "made-over" dishes — ways of putting a better dinner on the table out of vegetables past their prime. Turn-of-the-century American cookbooks are full of them, and the egg-and-crumb coating was a common household technique, used for potatoes, croquettes, cutlets, oysters and cold fish. The frank note that this is "a nice way to cook old potatoes" is a reminder that potatoes were a seasonal crop kept in a cellar through winter, losing moisture and turning sweet as their starch converted; the aim was not novelty but rescue.