The Ultimate Potato Book

The Ultimate Potato Book Hundreds of Ways to Turn America's Favorite Side Dish into a Meal BRUCE WEINSTEIN & MARK SCARBROUGH TO MARIANNE MACY, the sexiest potato eater in Manhattan Contents Introduction 1 A Potato Primer 3 Ingredients and Equipment 11 Potato Recipes, A to Z 17 Potato Recipes Listed by Type of Potato Used 247 Source Guide 250 Index 253 Acknowledgments 273 About the Author Books by Bruce Weinstein Credits Cover Copyright About the Publisher Introduction Here's the most radical thing we can tell you: The Ultimate Potato Book is a book of main courses. That may not seem like much--until you think about potatoes. They're side dishes, right? Mashed, roasted, fried, whatever. Sometimes they make a main course debut in a soup; usually they're relegated to the edge of the plate. We've decided to put them front and center. The recipes are alphabetized, mostly without the word ªpotatoº in their titles: Lasagna, in other words, not ªPotato Lasagna.º If you thumb through the book, you'll get the hang of how it works. But we'll admit it right up front: some of our cataloguing is idiosyncrat- ic. Provençal Stew, for example. It's a potato/tomato stew with Pernod. Some main courses naturally include potatoes on the side. Steak Frites, for example. But the potatoes aren't really a ªsideº so much as a co-dish, half the whole, integral to the entree. Although we're passionate about potatoes as main courses, you may still want to make them as traditional sides. To do so, find recipes like Steak Frites where potatoes are half the whole and just make the potato part. Here's a list: · Basic Boiled Potatoes (in Borscht, page 40, or Raclette, page 170) · Duchess Potatoes (in Beef Stew with Duchess Potatoes, page 35) · French Fries (in Fish and Chips, page 75) · Hash Browns (in Roesti, page 181) · Mashed Potatoes (a sour cream version in Bangers and Mash, page 30) · Mashed Potatoes (a more traditional version in Shepherd's Pie, page 189) · Oven-Roasted Fries (in Chili Fries, page 54) · Pan-Roasted Potatoes (in Potatoes Sarladaise, page 155) · Potato Pancakes (in Latkes, page 114) · Shoestring Fries (in Steak Frites, page 212) Finally, a word about potatoes. With the astounding abundance in North American markets, there are hundreds of varieties, but not all are widely available. Yes, Bintjes might be best for, say, French fries; Yellow Finns, for a gratin. But Bintjes and Yellow Finns are simply not available everywhere. There's no reason to be fussy. Most of us walk into the supermar- ket and see bins filled with ªbaking potatoes,º ªyellow-fleshed potatoes,º ªsweet potatoes,º and other generics--or if we're lucky, ªRussets,º ªYukon Golds,º ªGarnet Yams,º and two or three more varietals. Therefore, these recipes were developed with broad categories in mind, rather than specific varietals. Yes, we always make suggestions: ªred-skinned potatoes, such as French Fingerlings.º But these are just suggestions, helpful only if you live near some well-stocked gourmet store or farmer's market. True enough, a Russian Banana might be better than a Yukon Gold for Fondue. But unwarranted snobbishness does not get dinner on the table. 2 THE ULTIMATE POTATO BOOK A Potato Primer A Short History of the Spud: From Deadly Poison to Culinary Staple According to some, the Irish, with their monasteries and books, saved Western civilization after the fall of Rome. And to cure the famines that ravaged the Emerald Isle, farmers planted potatoes, which saved the Irish. So by that logic, the lowly spud saved.¼Well, we wouldn't want to overstate the case, would we? Truth be told, the potato was once feared in the West as a fiend, something straight out of the ground, like the devil. What nefarious activity was it carrying on down there? But long before Europeans were superstitious about the potato, it was cultivated in the high Andes, having been brought up from the Chilean coast sometime in the fourth millennium B.C. Modern blue potatoes, by the by, are the closest cousins of these original potatoes. Simply put, the spud survived in high altitudes and at frigid temperatures where corn didn't. From there, the history of the potato gets mixed up with that other, older history of the strong subjugating the weak. The Incas conquered the tribes around Lake Titicaca, in the Peru-Bolivia re- gion, and so the potato spread throughout their empire. Then the Spanish conquered the Incas, and the spud slipped from the hands of one imperialist to the next. The problem was, the Conquistadors and their advisers categorized this newfangled fleshy root among the New World's ªdeadly nightshades,º evildoers that included tomatoes, eggplants, and even belladonna, a true killer. When potatoes made their way back to Spain around 1570, they were mere curiosities, ornamental garden plants, adored for the fear they inspired, like Venus's flytraps. Spuds gained acceptance, like so much else, through a mistake. About seventy years before their arrival on the European continent, Columbus and his sailors had brought back another strange veget- able from the New World: the sweet potato, or ªbatataº in Carib- bean dialects. (If you're lucky, you can still find batatas in your market--they ooze sugar, sticky blots of it, from punctures in their skins. Terrific roasted, they are surprisingly light and fluffy, almost dry.) The sweet potato had become something of a fad in Spain-- it was too sweet to be evil, apparently, and certainly not associated with those devil-worshipping Incas. After the spud had settled a few years in the Old World, some brave soul made the logical leap that if sweet potatoes were good, that other thing from the ground must be, too. (In case you're wondering, the mistake was thinking that sweet potatoes and potatoes were just different versions of each other. They're not. More on that later.) For no scientific reason the two foods were both named ªpotato,º leading to endless confusion. The spud flashed across Europe during the Enlightenment as a marvel of social engineering, a quick fix for famines, a cheap way to feed the poor. Germany was soon converted, then Poland, then Russia. In their missionary zeal, potatoes even made it all the way back across the Atlantic to North America, only to be greeted with insults. John Adams once said he'd rather suffer the indignity of eating potatoes than submit to the British crown. But a few years later, Thomas Jefferson, ever the iconoclast, daringly claimed to have eaten--and enjoyed--them. At about the same time, Antoine-August Parmentier, a French chemist, was released from a German pokey (where he'd been held as a prisoner of war). He made his way back to Paris, singing the praises of prison food--potatoes. As a reward for his military ser- vice, he was given a coveted plot of land inside the city limits. Naturally, he planted his favorite crop--and then, to assure its lasting acceptance, hired goons to patrol the field, as if it were Fort Knox, but told them to look the other way when Parisians began pilfering it. So began the spud's rise onto the best tables. Today, potatoes are one of the few truly global crops. China, a latecomer to the potato game, is now the world's largest producer; Saudi Arabia has a near mania for French fries; in Zimbabwe, the spud's burgeoning industry in a nearly ruined economy. Now cultivated on every continent in places such as Mali, India, Thail- and, Borneo, and Australia, the lowly potato has truly become the world's cuisine. 4 THE ULTIMATE POTATO BOOK Sweet Potatoes: The Welcome Interlopers The confusion between sweet potatoes and potatoes arose because of reasoning that went like this: if two things look alike, they must be the same thing. But a sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas, if you go in for Latin bio-speak) isn't a potato (Solanum tuberosum). For one thing, a sweet potato prefers warmer climes like the Caribbean islands or the American South; a potato, chilly places like the Andes, Maine, or Idaho. We've included those welcome interlopers, sweet potatoes, in the potato category because it's just too late to extricate ourselves from mistakes made several hundred years ago. Besides, sweet potatoes are often found in the same types of dishes as potatoes: casseroles, stews, and gratins. And they get put on the same counter in the market. But to make matters more confusing, some savvy Dixie marketers got together years ago and decided to call their sweet potatoes ªyams,º to distinguish them from Yankee varietals. Nothing could be more misleading. A yam is yet another food entirely: a white- fleshed, dry, sometimes almost sour, dark-skinned tuber. Chances are, you'll rarely run across a true yam, unless you're shopping in African, Filipino, or Japanese markets. In a break for clarity, we only call for sweet potatoes in this book, no yams. Potato Types We've used six broad categories of potatoes because we were trying to keep the recipes in focus with the way most of us find potatoes in our local markets. In other words, our categories are not as precise as they are practical. Here's our basic breakdown. BAKING POTATOES. Don't let the name fool you. We mean those large, brown-skinned, white-fleshed, high-starch, oval potatoes that are not necessarily just for baking. There are generics now available in supermarkets--but we prefer Russets, and say so in the recipes.

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