air and obtain the lightness of whipped cream.
American recipes take a more gentle
approach, sieving mealy varieties and
carefully stirring in liquid and fat to avoid
excessive cell damage, starch release, and
glueyness.
Fried Potatoes Fried potatoes are some of the
world’s favorite foods. Deep-fried potato
sticks and slices and the technique of double-
frying were all well known in Europe by the
middle of the 19th century, and in England
were attributed mainly to the French: hence
the term “French fry” for what the French
simply call fried potatoes (pommes frites).
These products happily turned out to be
among the few foods whose quality need not
be compromised by mass production. Of
course they’re rich: the frying oil in which
they’re immersed coats their surface and is
drawn into the tiny pores created when the
surfac dries out. The proportion of oil to