Comfort me with potatoes

“It is easy to think of potatoes,” wrote M.F.K. Fisher, “and fortunately for men who have not much money it is easy to think of them with a certain safety.”

Indeed. A potato looks and smells like a double handful of dirt, and is almost as cheap. Lately, I am too busy to shop often, and too aware of my checkbook's bottom line to shop as expansively as I would like when I do hit the grocery store. Kitchen thrift makes me feel pinched and mean. Happily for me, when I have cooked and eaten my way to a bare refrigerator, there are usually one or two Idahos still rolling around the recesses of the vegetable bin.

There are few things that I love more than a baked potato. They have a sturdy, secure heft in the hand, like a hot stone. Under a fat pat of butter and a little salt, a baked potato tastes of simple, subtle contrasts: the muddy flavor of the rough, dusky skin against the steaming, yielding white flesh underneath.

In English, potatoes in their skins are “in their jackets.” In Italian, they are in veste da camera — ‘in their nightshirts.’ If potatoes are cooked out of their jackets, many of their vitamins and vegetables leave them. (If potatoes are not cooked at all, we cannot digest their starch.) I love the autumnal crackle of baked potato skin between my molars, and a warm jacketed potato is as instinctively comforting to me as a warm bed in winter.

When I bake potatoes, I puncture each potato’s protuberant jacketed flanks with the tines of fork so that it does not explode. (This may be superstitious — I am not sure. A scene in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Farm Boy — where want of ventilation sends steaming spuds rocketing from a campfire — made me a religious piercer of potatoes at an early age.)

Letting them bake at 350F for 1 hour warms the kitchen. The smell of hot starch is primordially soothing; it sits in the hot air like the aroma of bread baking at a distance . When the potatoes are done, I split them cross-wise with a knife, push the long ends of the potato towards each other to make an origami opening, smear in a finger of butter and a pinch of salt, and eat. And while the meal is plain, it is very, very good.

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• The United Nations has designated 2008 International Year of the Potato. (Potatoes: For the truly hungry)
• Historic Potato recipes

Snow Tang Clan

I was hoping that it would snow in New York this winter. Today, it finally did. The snow was hard and granular, and crackled like Pop Rocks when it landed. The candy sound of the snow puts me in the mind of Tang. I wish I had a canister of it, the snow looks tasty.

Have you ever eaten powdered Tang* on snow**? It's the best. Every winter, my brother and sister and I used to eat heaps of the first snowfall under shovelfulls of artificial orange Instant Breakfast Drink. During the same phase of our childhood when we were eating a lot of instant ramen (and I do mean a lot — to break up the monotony of noodle soup, we took to pouring hot water over the dry noodle rafts and eating them al dente with the dehydrated broth sprinkled on top), we used to scoop up a bowl of clean snow, bring it inside, and chop powdered citrusy sugary orangeness into it with a spoon. It always made a horribly lurid puree, but it tasted sublime: icy and refreshing, piquant and tart and sweet. If you've ever dipped into a can of frozen orange juice concentrate, you've experienced the essence of Tang on snow. (Bizzarre, how both these horrible drinks are best at their most dense.)

In Vermont, syrup shacks will, for a couple of bucks, serve you warm maple-syrup and a bowl of snow, with a pickle, a donut, and a cup of coffee on the side. Although I loooove tree sap with my coffee, I'm not mad about the rest. Give me the florescence of tart astronaut orange juice any day.

Afterthoughts

*Tang was patented in 1957, first sold in supermarkets in 1959. No one really went for it, until in 1965 someone at NASA, noting that Tang Instant Breakfast Drink met all the requirements for space travel, sent Tang into orbit with the Apollo and Gemini missions. In outer space, Tang was available in additional flavors: chocolate and grapefruit, as well as the more earth-bound orange.

**It's probably not a good idea to eat snow. The last time I melted some — I think this must have been in Sighnaghi sometime when the pipes had frozen — the water from the snow was cloudy and unappetizing.

Year of the Pig, adieu!

A tip of the nib to Jonathan Gold, who came to New York and sucked the skin off of a deep-fried pig's ear.

This ran on Saveur's blog (I am interning at the magazine this semester, yes indeed). If it were possible to provide you with a link to the URL of the post, I would, but that's not how Saveur.com works. (Alas.) Since it is such a short, light little thing, I am posting it here in its entirity.

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I Fork New York
by Karen Shimizu

Jonathan Gold, the Pulitzer Prize-winning restaurant critic for LA Weekly, writes his weekly restaurant column--"Counter Intelligence"--with expeditionary zeal. A thoroughly democratic eater, Gold celebrates Los Angeles's gastronomic landscape in all of its permutations, from trendy tapas bars to street-side taco shacks.

In this week's column, however, the LA critic returns to his old, er, chomping grounds (from 1999 to 2001 he wrote reviews of New York restaurants for Gourmet magazine) to salute the passing of the Year of the Pig in the Big Apple. With just a weekend to canvas the city, Gold gets busy. "I ate 30 different pig preparations in a little less than 48 hours," he writes, "and it would have been more if I'd gone with the flow."

It is the rude elements of ordinary food--chunks of bread, froufrou-free vegetables, and coarse meats--that fuel Gold's most passionate culinary reveries. He celebrates strong and simple fare in a down-home lexicon that includes words like "oozy," "leathery," "earthy," "gritty," "spare," and "oily." He is not interested in decorous eating or mannered writing; his prose is muscular and sticky-fingered, and rapture hits hardest when a meal leaves him greasy-chinned.

Readers are there by Gold's side at the Spotted Pig as he sits down to a deep-fried pig's ear, and--thanks to his arrestingly descriptive writing--can all but taste the food as it disappears down his gullet.

"You tear into an entire, freaking ear with a sharp knife and a fork, chomp through crisp bits and bony nubs, shards of skin, pockets of former gristle converted to goo. You are close to the animal, even part of the animal; you're Mike Tyson sinking sharp teeth into Evander Holyfield, a Neanderthal devouring his share of the kill," writes Gold. He goes on to rhapsodize about pig's foot at Babbo, roasted marrowbones at Blue Ribbon, cured pork belly, curried head cheese, and pork-jowl scrapple at Resto, Korean-style pork shoulder "braised into sweet, caramelized submission" at Momofuko Ssäm Bar, and the kaleidoscope of charcuterie at Bar Boulud.

While Gold usually finds fuel for his columns in LA, his latest piece carries a palpable whiff of nostalgia for New York's frank fondness for meat. For myself, I just hope that he comes back soon for another binge. Gold's unfettered cave-man hymns to the pleasures of the bone make me nod in agreement and wipe imaginary grease from my chin.