Idaho Potatoes, Ice Cream and Inventiveness…

If you have seen my Theme Reveal for the A2Z Challenge 2022, then you will know that I am writing about becoming Vegetarian gradually as a response to the crisis in food supply chains sparked by the pandemic and made worse by the WAR in Ukraine. As well, I am keeping to the theme I originally planned of food which can be eaten in its own right as well as becoming an ingredient in other dishes…

Dang! Another difficult letter when it comes to food items. Cheating a little bit, I am going for the Idaho Potatoe because (apart from the fact there is an I in there) – the Idaho is a floury, or mealy potato and this is perhaps the most useful type as an ingredient. Waxy potatoes are great for salads and they will hold together in a stew, but floury means mash, roast potatoes with rough, crisp outsides, soups and purees.

Ice cream – well I manage an ice cream, or rather gelato factory so some room for disambiguation there…

This site, though American, is a pretty good guide to the main types of potato eaten in the US and Europe but let’s not forget that the potato originally came from South America. Here is an excellent book telling the history of the spud – and it is truly a fascinating one…

To understand why floury potatoes do what they do, I turn to my culinary bible “McGee on food and Cooking – an Encyclopedia of Kitchen Science, History and Culture“. He says “Mealy types […] concentrate more dry starch in their cells, so they’re denser than waxy types. When cooked , the cells tend to swell and separate from each other, producing a fine, dry, fluffy texture that works well in fried potatoes and in baked and mashed potatoes.”

I am tempted to give you the recipe for Greek Lemon Roast Potatoes which I discovered when we hid from Covid in Crete for the winter of 2020 – I had never imagined pairing lemon and potatoe but whilst amazing, it is hardly the potato as ingredient, but you can find it here. Instead I give you PatataFagusta – a Maltese dish which translates as “drowned potatoes”. I discovered this on holiday in Malta some 43 years ago and found it to be almost a whole new method of cooking…

Patata Fagusta
1. Fill a medium saucepan with 50% Potatoes and %0% Onions – both cut into one inch cubes
2. Add plenty of chopped garlic and mixed herbs fresh or dried – a Provencal mix is great
3. Por over 1/2 a pint of water and a good shot of olive oil
4. Bring to the boil slowly under a tight fitting lid, stir and reduce the heat to the lowest for some 25 minutes and stir once or twice.
This is the basic recipe and produces a sort of stew, but much more quickly than normal and once you have the method down, you can embellish it with small amounts of Chorizo or prawns, or a tin of chopped tomatoes, orcurry paste instead of herbs – you get the picture…

Which leads me nicely on to Invention or should it be Improvisation? I rarely follow recipes exactly, except perhaps for baking, but even with baking, once you have done it for long enough, you can start to invent – otherwise, how would any new cakes emerge? No, what I do is to look for principles or methodologies in cooking which I can adapt to what ingredients I have in my part of the world, what equipment I have in my kitchen. Hence with the recipe above – it is definitely not a conventional stew where different things are added to the hot pot in sequence and then stock added and the whole cooked off. No, everything goes in cold and is brought up to temperature and then reduced to a slow cook with the water and oil at the bottom, preventing sticking. and the modifications you can make bring it into the realms of invention.
I put my inventiveness down to my mother’s cooking, she was a classic English housewife cook of her time, but she read the cookery sections of Woman’s Weekly and would try out things like Sweetcorn Bake, or for the rare dinner parties, Beef Olives (thin slices of beef flattened further and wrapped around stuffing, tied up, browned and cooked in a casserole – nothing Mediterranean to be seen here!). I don’t remember ever having olives till after I left university and moved to Brixton in London. My mother’s cooking was sufficiently inventive to give permission to follow suit. At university, I caught the bug for cooking and devoured cookery books (not literally) Chinese cookery, the Penguin Indian Cookery and most inspiring of all Elizabeth David’s Mediterranean Coookery. This reputedly racy woman is credited with changing the course of cookery in England and she certainly did it for me with her beautiful descriptions of the food she found as she travelled around Europe. She also wrote one of the definitive, scholarly works on English Bread and Yeast Cookery.

Oh! I promised to disambiguate Ice Cream v. Gelato… Well, Gelato is denser, more intensely flavoured than Ice Cream, the latter having more air whipped into it during the manufacture. The ingredients are much the same. Ice cream will melt more quickly in your cornet but who is to say that that lighter quality is not just as nice on a hot day. Gelato is to be enjoyed with a small spoon, summer or winter, day or night…

Have you invented a dish you are proud of and what influences have you absorbed into your cooking style?