Skip to main content
Main

French Fried Potatoes

French Fried Potatoes are small potatoes cut into eighths, fried until golden and seasoned with coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

French Fried Potatoes

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and peel the small potatoes.

  2. Cut them into eighths lengthwise.

  3. Soak the potato pieces in ice water for 1 hour.

  4. Remove from water and dry between towels.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry the potatoes until golden brown.

  2. Drain and sprinkle with coarse sea salt.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

What each ingredient does

Small potatoes
Starchy flesh becomes fluffy inside and crisp outside when fried.
Ice water
Soaking removes surface starch so the fries crisp rather than stick together.

The step that matters

Drying the potato pieces. Surface water cools the oil and causes splattering and steaming, so the fries brown unevenly and turn soggy. Thorough drying lets the surface crisp.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes