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French Fried Potatoes

French Fried Potatoes are potatoes fried in hot lard or clarified beef suet until soft then browned, seasoned with coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and beef are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,052 recipes. Both carry sotolon, which smells curry, maple. The science ↓

French Fried Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the potatoes and place them in a tub of cold water.

  2. Cut the potatoes into pieces about ½ inch square and 3 inches long.

Fry

  1. Place the potato pieces in a French frying basket and immerse in hot lard or clarified beef suet.

  2. Cook until the potatoes are soft.

  3. Remove the basket to allow the fat to become smoking hot.

  4. Lower the basket back into the fat and cook until the potatoes are brown.

  5. Remove the potatoes and drain on a clean kitchen towel.

  6. Season with coarse sea salt and serve on a fancy folded napkin.

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 + beeftop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,052 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

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

What each ingredient does

Medium size potatoes
Starchy flesh that softens inside while the outside crisps and browns in the hot fat.
Hot lard or clarified beef suet
Hot fat that conducts heat quickly, cooking the potatoes and browning their surfaces.

The step that matters

Remove the basket to allow the fat to become smoking hot.. The first frying softens the potatoes at a lower heat. Reheating the fat to very hot before the second fry drives off surface moisture, so the exterior turns crisp and brown rather than greasy.

“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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