The taste of recent Irish potato history:
Tayto – the original cheese and onion crisp – which has, for the last few weeks, been available in this special edition old-school packaging with Irish language text.
Have one in your mouth, be peeling a second, have a third in your fist, and your eye on the fourth.
So went an old Irish saying, referring to a time in this country when meals for many were composed of potatoes and little else (and when five-a-day meant five kilos of potatoes, the average daily intake of an adult male in the years leading up to the Famine). The saying was recalled by Pádraic Óg Gallagher of Gallagher’s Boxty House on Bia Dúchais, a series on TG4 which explores Irish culinary heritage and whose attention, last week, focused on our relationship with the potato, from early adoption and dependency, to the blighted years of the Famine and, later, to the arrival of the Irish-Italian chipper and the modern potato crisp (five kilos a day of which, however tasty, is probably not to be recommended).
Whaddya Sayin’?