Dear Claire,

Can it be a year since you left already? I hope Canada is treating you well and that your Barry’s tea supplies are holding up.

While the news reports hereabouts are generally doomy and gloomy, at least they aren’t a kind of World War Two bad, in which case we’d be looking for you to send your tea back to us!

The Da – your Granda – who, as a young army cadet, was responsible for doling out rations during WW2, tells me that the tea allowance was 3/28th of an ounce per person per day – which I reckon is about a teabag’s worth. With rations like that, you’d be hanging out for the emigrant relations to do the needful and send tea home (like Grannie, who, according to this custom’s declaration, was sent 10lb of tea in 1942 by a cousin who had emigrated to New York).

Declaration for 10lb of tea, sent in 1942 to my Dad's mother from her cousin in New York

And even with the rationing, I’m sure Grannie would have managed some boiled cake to go with the tea.

In fact I thought of you when I found a recipe for ‘Canada’s Cake’ on the inside cover of one of the Ma’s old cookbooks. It’s a version of boiled fruit cake which Ma says that her ma (Grandma) made often, having gotten the recipe in 1924 at a local church bazaar on Valentia Island.

I couldn’t resist making some to mark your first Canadian year.

Happy anniversary kiddo.

Love,
Auntie Spud

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Canada’s Cake

This is my rendition of the recipe for Canada’s Cake as handed down from my Grandma. It’s a boiled fruit cake, where dried fruit is simply boiled in water with some spices and other flavourings, cooled and then mixed with flour and baking soda. It’s an old-fashioned treat that you can eat as is or you might like to spread with some butter if you have it. It’s simple, unfancy, economical and won’t win prizes for elegance, but is still worthy of a place on the teatime table.

You’ll need:

• 450g sultanas (or other dried fruit)
• 200g demerara sugar
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 0.5 tsp gnd cloves
• 1 tsp malt vinegar
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 tblsp butter
• 400ml hot water
• 450g plain flour
• 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

You’ll also need:

• I used an 18cm round cake tin that was about 7.5cm deep. This made for a very full tin and very tall cake, which took longer to bake than I’d anticipated. I would be inclined to use a 20cm square tin next time.

The Steps:

• Add the sultanas, sugar, cinnamon, cloves, vinegar, salt and butter to a medium-sized saucepan along with the hot water. Bring to a boil over a medium heat and simmer for 5 minutes.
• Remove from the heat and allow the mixture to cool fully (I left it for about 2 hours).
• When you’re ready to bake the cake, preheat your oven to 150C and grease and line your baking tin.
• Dissolve the bicarbonate of soda in a teaspoon of hot water and add to the boiled fruit mixture along with the flour. Mix until combined.
• Scrape the cake mixture into your baking tin and bake until a skewer inserted comes out fairly cleanly. This took about 2 hours for me but start checking the cake periodically after about an hour. You’ll also want to cover the cake with foil at that stage, as any fruit exposed at the top of the mixture may burn.
• Allow the cake to cool in the tin for 30 minutes or so and then turn out onto a wire rack to finish cooling. Once it’s cool, go and get the kettle on. Any cake that remains after teatime can be wrapped in foil, stored in an airtight tin and should keep for at least a couple of weeks.

The Variations:

• You can really vary the dried fruit and spices according to what you have and what you like.

The Results:

• One old-fashioned fruit cake which will serve one large Irish family for tea.

Hungry?

I hope so, because I’ve made some soup and it’s got your name written all over it.

In fact there’s enough to feed, oh, you and maybe 4 or 5 friends. And several people in Africa too.

Soup for a good cause

The Overseas Development Agency Gorta contacted me about their SoupForLife campaign, as part of which they are asking people here to gather ’round for a bowl or mug of soup on the 14th of May and make a small donation to their work fighting hunger and malnutrition in sub-Saharan Africa.
If you don’t want to make the soup yourself, a growing number of restaurants are participating by donating €1 for each bowl of soup purchased on that day (with more information available on that over at the SoupForLife blog).

But why soup?

During that most famous of periods in our history, when the entire country went hungry for lack of potatoes during The Great Famine, it was soup kitchens that fed a great number of the starving, simple as that.

Now, if you want to participate in the whole SoupForLife thing, there’s really no need to emulate famine-era soups. For one thing, it would imply a distinct lack of potatoes, which would put me right out of a soup-making job. No, it’s perfectly ok to fire away with the curried potato and cauliflower soup below or, if not that then perhaps some classic potato and leek soup or maybe some potato and lentil soup like so or like so. Alternatively, there’s Galician potato and bean soup or creamy potato, salmon and cream cheese chowder for you to try. If (gasp!) you’d like a soup that’s not quite so potato-heavy, then there are soups hereabouts made from carrot and ginger, pea and mint and tomato and black beans. And failing that, there’s always minestrone or good old Ukrainian borscht. So you really have no excuses. Go on, get your soup on.

It’s fairly safe to say that, back in 1742, people didn’t spend too much time obsessing about saturated fat or trying to reduce their carb intake. If anything, they were far more concerned with ingesting whatever carbs they could lay their hands on, spuds included.

I mention 1742 because that was the year of the first public performance of George Frideric Handel’s Messiah, which took place in Fishamble Street in Dublin, an event which will be commemorated on April 13th next in Temple Bar, with their Handel’s Day celebrations.

Handel had been invited to perform by the Charitable Musical Society, who wanted to raise funds following the Great Irish Famine of 1741 – an event perhaps lesser known, but equally as devastating as the later Potato Famine of 1845-47 – a combination of bad weather and poor harvests that froze potatoes in the ground and left a nation dying of hunger.

It is an indescribably long way from that famine to a world where, within the past few weeks, I have been sent notices about applications aimed at helping people to reduce their intake of saturated fat and carbs. Somebody has perhaps noticed the frequency with which spuds and butter are combined on this site and would like to do something about it, I fear.

The Sat Fat Challenge from the UK Food Standards Agency, for example, prompts the user to take different challenges which will reduce their saturated fat intake, some of which I can get behind and some of which – like the recommendation to use low fat milks and yoghurts – I can’t. That we have issues with over-eating and excesses of certain foods in our diet, I don’t deny, but I happen to be a big believer in sticking to full-fat-as-nature-intended when it comes to dairy products. And just because a yoghurt is labelled low-fat, doesn’t mean that it’s not laden with sugar.

That’s the thing, you see.

My real problem is with identifying one specific thing in isolation as the culprit of our dietary woes – yesterday salt, today saturated fats, tomorrow carbs and so on. Salt, fat, sugar – these are not the enemies per se, but highly processed foods – which can have excessive quantities of all of these – are. I’m not saying that we need to return to the privation of Handel’s day, but cutting down on highly processed foods, eating a goodly amount of whole foods and adopting an everything-in-moderation approach is more my style (Jamie Oliver’s style too it seems). Drip-feeding people with narrowly targeted applications (which themselves seem a little highly processed to me) seems like it manages to sidestep the broader question of what it takes to have a well-balanced and sane approach to eating and so, for me, falls some way short of the mark.

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Musical Spuds

Well, after that little rant, here’s a bit of sat-fat-and-carbs action for you – with due acknowledgement to Handel for inspiration in the musical shapes department. Musical shaping aside, these are basically duchesse potatoes, made when an egg-enriched mash is piped into shapes and baked.

The classic formula – as described in the likes of Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire and Larousse Gastronomique – calls for butter, egg and egg yolks to be added to the mash, though you’ll see plenty of variants which add milk, cream and/or cheeses to the mix. Really, you can add whatever you like – I’ve used goat’s cheese and mint here – as long as you keep the mixture fairly stiff, which makes for firmer shapes that are that bit easier to pipe.

You’ll need:

• 800g potatoes (about 4 medium-sized specimens), preferably a floury variety
• 50g butter
• 100g fresh goat’s cheese
• 3 tblsp finely chopped fresh mint
• salt to taste, plus more for boiling the potatoes
• freshly ground black pepper to taste
• 2 eggs

You’ll also need:

• A piping bag, star-shaped nozzle and a steady hand. If you don’t have a piping bag, you can use a clean plastic bag with a small opening snipped away from one corner.
• A potato ricer is useful, though not essential, for mashing the potatoes.
• You’ll need several large baking sheets on which to bake the shapes.

The Steps:

• Peel your potatoes and cut into roughly even-sized slices, around 1-2cm thick. Rinse them under cold water.
• Bring about 1.5l of water to the boil in a saucepan, add about 2 tsp salt and the potato slices.
• Bring back to the boil and reduce to a simmer. Simmer gently, covered, for around 12-15 minutes or until just fork-tender.
• Meanwhile, you can preheat your oven to 180C and grease your baking sheets.
• When the potatoes are done, drain well and return them to the saucepan. Then either let them sit, covered by a tea-towel, for about 5 minutes or place the pan over a low heat and stir the potatoes gently for a minute or so while they dry out.
• Place the butter in a small heavy saucepan over a medium heat and allow to melt.
• Put the cooked and still warm potatoes through a potato ricer, if you have one, or mash with a potato masher or, if all else fails, a fork.
• Pour in the melted butter and stir through the mash.
• Crumble the goat’s cheese, add to the mash and stir well to combine.
• Mix in the chopped mint and add salt and black pepper to taste.
• Lightly beat the eggs and stir into the mash.
• Now spoon enough of the mash into your piping bag to half-fill it, twist the top and, with a steady hand, squeeze the contents out onto your baking sheets and into whatever shapes take your fancy. You can just make shapes by hand if you prefer.
• As soon as you have a baking sheet filled with shapes, bake for around 12-15 minutes or until the edges are golden, and get to work on piping the next lot. I probably baked 6 trays-worth with this amount, though treble clefs do take up a lot of real estate. Simpler shapes can probably be done more efficiently.
• Serve as a side-dish – with the mint, I’m inclined to think this would be nice with lamb – or serve as party finger food.

The Variations:

• You could certainly add some garlic here if you fancied – throw a couple of whole cloves in when boiling the potatoes – and you can replace the goat’s cheese and mint with different dairy and herb combinations, such as, say, sour cream and chives or gruyère and thyme.

The Results:

• This amount probably feeds 4-6 as a side-dish, though the actual number of shapes you get will obviously depend on the size of your piping bag and the kind of shapes you’re after.

So, yes, it’s a big word indeed, especially when you consider that the spud is traditionally far more comfortable with adjectives like humble. Still, the potato is a vegetable to be reckoned with and, in honour of Jenn’s gesture, here are a few bits and pieces of spud-lore for you. Not necessarily awesome things, but interesting all the same.

(1) When first introduced to Europe, there was a widespread belief that potatoes caused leprosy, the nobbly shape of the early tubers being likened to a leper’s deformed hands and feet.

(2) One of the factors that influenced the eventual acceptance of the spud during the 17th and 18th centuries was the fondness which European countries had for going to war. While cereal crops would be ravaged by invading forces, an army could tramp across, or even camp, on a field of potatoes and the farmer would still be able to harvest the crop. The rise of the potato was thus the silver that lined Europe’s inability to live in peace and harmony.

(3) The War of the Bavarian Succession (1778-9), where Prussian and Austrian armies confronted each other over the right to lay claim to Bavarian territory, is also known as the Kartoffelkrieg or Potato War. As John Reader describes it in A History of the Propitious Esculent:

The opposing forces could do no more than threaten each other, while steadily munching their way through the region’s bountiful potato crop. At the onset of winter both armies … retreated – not victorious, but undefeated and well-fed.

(4) Ireland was one of the first countries in Europe to embrace the wholesale cultivation of the potato. Estimates for the average consumption of potatoes by an adult Irishman around the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries range from 10lb to 14lbs of potatoes a day, with one bishop of the time proclaiming that a labouring man needed 21lbs of the stuff every 24 hours. Nowadays potato consumption in Ireland, while still one of the highest in the world, is a more modest 300lbs per person per year.

(5) During the Great Potato Boom (and Bust) of 1903 and 1904, a frenzy developed over the acquisition of seeds for a variety called Eldorado, with single seed tubers being sold for as much as £150 and harvests being sold at the rate of £4,000 per ton, before said seeds were ever planted. The promise of Eldorado turned out to be as elusive as its namesake, however, and fortunes were lost as the trade in seed potatoes slumped. Remind you of anything?

(6) Spuds are known for their tubers, but they can produce fruit too, as some of mine did this year.

Potato Fruit

The fruit looks rather like a green cherry tomato, which is not too surprising, as potatoes and tomatoes both hail from the Solanaceae family. Unlike your average cherry tomato, the potato fruit is poisonous, so I do not recommend that you feed this to anyone you like. If potato breeding is your thing, though, you can always cultivate the seeds from your potato fruit and grow your own entirely new variety of spud. Perhaps even another Eldorado, who knows.

(7) Even if you’re not into potato breeding yourself, you will be relieved to know that there are samples of thousands of potato seeds held in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Spitsbergen in Norway. The Seed Vault, built into a mountain in permafrost conditions, holds duplicate samples of seeds from around the world and is intended to provide a safety net against accidental losses from traditional genebanks. Thousands of varieties of potato and sweet potato have been deposited there by the International Potato Centre in Peru, plus some 32 varieties from Ireland’s own national collection. Our spuds should be safe for a long time to come and that is awesome good to know.

The usual thing would be to spread the love and pass these on to other worthy blogs. However, there are so many blogs that I read and enjoy that it makes it a hard task to choose some and not others, so I think you should all share a piece of the glory. Just keep writing and I’ll keep reading.

The Potato Eaters by Vincent Van Gogh - image from www.vangoghgallery.com

The other usual thing in the case of the Honest Scrap would be for the recipient to enlighten the reader by telling them ten things about themselves that the reader might not know. I’m going to turn this somewhat on its head and tell you ten things that you may not know about potatoes and potato eaters (or perhaps you’re like me and you do know these things, in which case get in touch, we should start a club). Much of the following comes to me by way of John Reader’s excellent book Potato: A History Of The Propitious Esculent. Here goes…

(1) People were eating potatoes as far back as 12,500 years ago. Yep, we’re talking late Ice Age. The remains of potatoes from this era were found preserved at a site in Monte Verde in Southern Chile along with the bones of the now-extinct mastodon, a relative of the equally extinct woolly mammoth. Who knows but that the favourite meal of the ice age chilean was mastodon burger and chips.

(2) It’s estimated that domestication of the fairly toxic and bitter wild potato started in Peru around 8,000 years ago and, even today, farmers in the Andes grow at least 400 distinct varieties of potato.

(3) Papa Llunchuy Waqachi is one such Andean potato, whose name translates as “potato that makes the daughter-in-law weep”. The story goes that if the bride-to-be does a good job of peeling this potato, she is allowed to marry her man…

Papa Llunchuy Waqachi - image from www.foodcultura.org

(4) All of the cultivated potatoes that we are familiar with are members of a single sub-species developed in the Andes, solanum tuberosum tuberosum (so good they named it twice).

(5) Cultivation has significantly reduced the level of toxic glycoalkaloids found in potatoes, but some varieties in common use today, including Home Guard and British Queen, still have dangerously high concentrations during early tuber growth, only passing the danger zone once the tuber matures and the foliage dies.

(6) Listen to what your mother may have told you and avoid eating any part of a potato that has turned green. It’s an indicator of those glycoalkaloids, which can be concentrated by too much exposure to light during growth.

(7) While we mostly tend to think of the potato in carbohydrate terms, it’s got some high quality protein too, especially if you eat them skins and all. The biological value of potato protein – a measure of nitrogen absorbed and retained by the body for growth and maintenance – is second only to that of eggs. In controlled experiments, people have sustained active lives for months, subsisting on potatoes and a little margarine, maintaining perfect health and without weight loss or gain. Probably not having much fun though.

(8) Someday, we will have spuds in space. Potatoes are one of the mainstays of NASA’s Bio-regenerative Life Support System, a self-sustaining food system, in which astronauts on long missions will grow their own vegetables. So, if they should ever undertake that mission to send people to Mars, they’ll be eating spuds all the way.

(9) Back down to earth and you’ll no doubt be shocked and horrified to learn that this here potato eater wasn’t actually that keen on boiled spuds as a kid. I’m over that now, as you can probably tell.

(10) That other great potato eater in my life, my Da, ain’t that keen on crash hot potatoes. He told me so the other day. He doesn’t get the slightly-mashed-but-with-skins-still-on thing. So family take note and stick to mash.

Yes, you could say that I have taken a bit of a minimalist approach to the Eating Your Words Challenge.

When the call was put forth by Tangled Noodle and Savor The Thyme to write or spell something using food or drink, a multitude of things raced through my mind. Should I bake letter-shaped cakelets, freeze some icy vowels, spell something delicate and spidery using vermicelli, pipe out some sugary iced messages or just buy a tin of alphabet spaghetti? Others, I could see, had been very creative in response to this edible poser.

In the end, however, I cheated cast aside the elaborate preparations that were formed only in my head, got out my finest kitchen knife, applied it to the contents of my vegetable drawer, et voilà. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you C. For celery. A vegetable that comes with its own initial. All quite self-contained, see?

So what of celery, then? A vegetable that is mostly water, some fibre, not much fat or protein to speak of and a good deal of Vitamin C (there’s that letter again). To describe it thus, however, is to miss the interesting stuff about celery. Let’s see…

The Ancient Greeks thought enough of celery to use its leaves as laurels for crowning their esteemed athletes, while Homer (that’s the poet, not the Simpsons character) mentions wild celery in both The Odyssey and The Iliad. The Ancient Romans used celery as a seasoning and also considered it to be an aphrodisiac. You can make your own mind up as to whether there may have been a connection between these two facts.

It was only much later though, during the 17th century, when celery-the-food really started to come into its own, thanks to the French, who started using it as soupstuff. Celery now occupies a place of honour as part of the triumvirate of onion, carrot and celery that, when chopped up and sautéed together, constitute the classic French mirepoix, the jumping off point for any number of stocks, soups and stews.

Celery also participates in another mighty threesome, buddying up as it does with onion and bell pepper to form the cornerstone of many Cajun and Creole dishes.

It is endlessly versatile. Use the stalks raw or cooked in any number of ways (well, except maybe boiling – as it says in D. G. Hessayon’s Vegetable & Herb Expert, “there are many ways of cooking celery but boiling is not one of them”). Use the leaves like parsley. Use the seeds to season. Use the root of some varieties (celeriac) for gratins and mashes. Here, in amongst the Spud archives (am I really around long enough to have archives?), it has been used thus far:

• as dipping stuff for hummus
• as pickle-worthy seasoning for courgette and onion pickle
• in partnership with chickpeas for mock tuna salad
• asian style in spring onion sauce
• and, of course, as a worthy accompaniment to your ever humble spud in potato and celeriac mash

It has most certainly not, however, been used as a dessert. I found reference here to the fact that, before the incident with the volcano, the folks in old Pompeii were given to eating a dessert of roasted celery, honey and ground pepper. So of course I had to try it out. Let me just say that it was frankly a little strange as a dessert and perhaps, like much of Pompeii, best left buried.

I appreciate the potato only as a protection against famine, except for that, I know of nothing more eminently tasteless.

Ouch!

Perhaps the author’s experience was based on potatoes such as Lumpers, a variety grown in Ireland in the early 1800s. A piece in this weeks Daily Telegraph quotes Alan Romans, author of The Potato Book, who describes Lumpers as “A nasty, wet potato but with a huge yield … No one would eat it today. It gives a real insight into how desperate and determined the Irish were to survive.” And so we were, clearly!

Searching for potatoes (Lumpers, no doubt) during famine times in Ireland - Illustrated London News, circa 1849

Luckily, tastes (and potato varieties) have moved on, so we can relegate the wet, nasty Lumpers to the history books. In their place is a bewildering array of tastier varieties, though only a fraction are grown for commercial use. Oftentimes, if there’s a specific variety you’d like to try, the only option may be to grow it yourself, if you have the garden space and time. Or perhaps you’d just like to grow potatoes for the sheer pleasure of being able to dig up and, later, devour a dinner’s worth, whatever the variety. I’m certainly in that camp myself. In fact, during a recent conversation with my good friend MGH, she suggested that I should be setting about the business of getting my seed potatoes for this year now. (I should point out that while the G in MGH doesn’t actually stand for ‘Garden’, it should…!)

“Yikes” says I. “I wouldn’t have thought about getting my seed potatoes until March, closer to planting time.”

“Yes” says she, “but if you want to be sure of getting specific varieties, you should be on the lookout now.”

Ah. I see.

Thus far in my potato growing career, I’ve tried Duke of York and Sharpe’s Express – both classic first earlies (meaning that they take a shorter length of time to mature than maincrop potatoes and are ready to lift early in the summer). Both are full of flavour. Duke of York is a great all-rounder with its yellow skin and light yellow flesh, Sharpe’s Express has bright white flesh, smooth pale skin and (if left to mature) very floury texture. I’d happily grow either again. Though maybe I should try something different this year, or really push the boat out and plant a couple of different varieties. Either way, I should get my skates on and start investigating what’s available. One thing is for sure though, Lumpers need not apply!