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French Fried Potatoes

French Fried Potatoes are sliced potatoes fried in lard and seasoned with coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,355 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

French Fried Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the potatoes and cut them lengthwise into ½ inch thick slices.

  2. Coat the potato slices in flour.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat lard in a pan and fry the coated potatoes until golden brown.

  2. Season with coarse sea salt before serving.

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

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Provide the starchy body of the fries that cooks through to a soft interior.
Flour
Forms a coating that helps the surface brown and crisp in the hot fat.
Lard
Frying fat that conducts heat to the potatoes and drives browning on the surface.

The step that matters

Frying until golden brown. Fat that is not hot enough lets the coated potatoes soak up grease and turn soggy instead of crisp. Frying in batches keeps the pan hot so the surface browns and sets quickly.

“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.

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