Potato

Very simple to make, this dish goes well with all kinds of brunch meats, such as steak or pastrami, and with eggs. It is easy to double or triple when you’re serving a lot of people. Red-skinned potatoes have a moist, less starchy texture than baking potatoes and are ideal for boiling. Use the smallest ones you can find.

Sweet potatoes make delicious home fries, and with the addition of ginger, these become something really special. Choose small to medium sweet potatoes and use them within a week: They don’t keep as long as white potatoes. Store sweet potatoes in a dark, cool place, but don’t refrigerate them.

To make this dish, you’ll need a mandoline, which is a hand-operated slicing appliance with assorted blades for thick to thin slicing. A metal kitchen utensil known as a spider, which vaguely resembles a spider web with a long handle, is handy when frying because it lets you quickly remove hot food from the oil without removing much of the oil. It’s inexpensive and sold in most kitchenware shops. Soaking the julienned potatoes before cooking them removes some of the starch and yields a crisp shoestring effect.

Also known as latkes, these crispy, golden treats are a childhood favorite and are best served with caramelized onions, sour cream, and fresh, tangy farmers’ market applesauce. Allow yourself about twenty minutes to soak the grated potatoes in the cold water to remove the starch. Otherwise, they become gluey as the starch cooks in the potatoes and they won’t get crispy.

While the classic fried potato dish served with bacon and eggs in diners everywhere is excellent on its own, the “smothered and covered” variation is more decadent, blanketing the crusty brown potatoes with caramelized onions and cheese. Thanks must be given here to the Waffle House chain for their inspired innovation!

A robust and filling variation on classic home fries, this pretty vegetable dish gets color and crunch from the asparagus. It pairs especially well with Crispy Crab Cakes (page 198) and Scrambled Eggs (page 75), though potato lovers may decide to eat this as a main course. This is a great way to fit vegetables into a brunch without its being too healthy.

What would bacon and eggs be without a side of home fries? These “homers” are too good to be called simply a “side.” Many Bubby’s customers prefer to eat them in great quantities with an accompaniment of bacon or sausage.

The classic Indian spinach dish saag aloo, where spinach and potatoes are added to spiced and softened onions, is often cooked a while longer than I would like it to be. Authentically, the spinach goes in before the potatoes, so that it makes an impromptu sauce. Delicious. But I sometimes make it less than classically, keeping the spinach almost whole and adding it last, so that it comes to the table singing brightly, more as an ingredient than a “sauce.”

There have been many highly original versions of the straightforward miner’s lunch (if you couldn’t come up to the surface for lunch, you took a warm pasty down with you, holding the thickly crimped edge with your grubby hands, then leaving it behind to appease the spirits of the mine) but I have rarely enjoyed one as much as those I have eaten in Cornwall. My pasty is (categorically) not a Cornish pasty. I precook my filling, you see, which Cornish cooks would never do. I cook the meat and vegetables before wrapping them in the pastry crust purely because it results in a pasty whose filling is especially tender and giving. I also use a proportion of butter in the pastry too. The similarity between my pasty and a Cornish one is purely in the ingredients: beef, potato, onion, and rutabaga. Chaucer was partial to a pasty—they appear in The Canterbury Tales, and in several of Shakespeare’s plays, including The Merry Wives of Windsor, All’s Well That Ends Well, and Titus Andronicus. We shall gloss over the small point that Titus uses Chiron and Demetrius’s bodies rather than the more traditional beef skirt steak. I do suggest you let the finished parcels rest for half an hour before baking, if you get the chance.

Modern pasty recipes, especially those in the more touristy enclaves of Britain’s farthest southern county, stretch the recipe almost as far as Titus, swapping beef for pork, the rutabaga for apple, even daring to crimp the finished turnover on the top instead of at the side. I make one without meat, in which I use goat cheese and thyme along with the usual starchy filling of potato and rutabaga. It is filling, yet somehow soft and gentle, too.

Rutabaga’s ability to sponge up liquid is shown to good effect when it is baked with butter and vegetable stock. When it is teamed up with potato and seasoned with garlic and a spot of mustard, it is as near to a main course as I feel you can safely get with this particular root.

I’m not suggesting we should inflict anything on our family or friends that they won’t eat, but there are worse ways of getting rid of an unwanted rutabaga than in this three-root mash. Works well with pretty much anything, even fish.

January 2007. It is not especially cold, but has been raining nonstop for two days. Even the short dash from bus to front door leaves me soaked through and in need of some sort of carbohydrate and fat. Butter and beef dripping seem suddenly more appropriate than olive oil. Even more so the little bowl of duck fat I saved from last Sunday’s roast. Perhaps it was the week before. No matter, it keeps for months. It is said that people used to rub this snow-white fat on their chest to ward off a cold. I prefer to take my duck dripping internally, and set about a simple layered potato dish with thyme and garlic. The addition of the pumpkin was a spur-of-the-moment thing. It works well, adding a sweet nuttiness to the recipe. I like it on its own too, with a sharp and vinegary green salad at its side. It is also a good side dish for meat of some sort and wonderful with cuts from yesterday’s roast, just the thing for a cold roast chicken or duck leg.

This is my version of the Spanish omelette, being lighter, crisper, and more studded with herbs than the norm. The point here is that you can mix the herbs to suit your taste. Tarragon and mint are a must for me, but any of the more unusual herbs is worth using too: chopped sorrel leaves, salad burnet, lovage, or any of the lesser-known basils. Because the herbs are only lightly cooked in this recipe, their flavor will stay true.