Gravy soakers and melting moments
I PRETEND to know a lot about wine. Winemakers, estates, fine vintages. You could say I have an educated palate.
I know my Cape from my South of France to the New World. My cubby has successive book editions of Platter’s South African Wine Guide and I salivate over social media’s über connoisseur, Yegas Naidoo.
But that’s just snobbery. I have been deceived by Odd Bins and Château de Box, even the kraaitjie papsak.
Not so with potatoes. Being a native of my beloved Chatsworth, I consider myself the Britannica of the humble tuber.
I know my Cape Douglas from my UTD. I know my Big Lucks, my Gravy Soakers and my Melting Moments.
No mutton, fowl or Cornish curry is complete without just the right potatoes. It must be soft with the flavour soaking right through.
Hard potatoes or water potatoes will destroy a cook’s reputation forever. The fellow who sold the potatoes in Bangladesh market will be in for a really good hiding.
It’s not unlikely that the cook will carry the rest of the offending pocket and throw it right back at him.
That’s no mean feat. Once the pockets were 15kg in a tough brown paper bag. If you were shy on wrapping paper for school books, you could use the unprinted layer.
The Chatsworth ganja merchants still use it for wrapping their kaitjies. Nowadays the pockets have slinked down to 10kg and, more commonly, 7kg.
Even so, marketing the potatoes is aggressive business. Interest will likely have the vendor snappily tip the pocket into a huge plastic dish.
At a glance the buyer could gauge the quality right through and confirm that no rotten potatoes lie hidden in the bag.
Just when I thought I knew it all I stumbled across John Reader’s The Untold History of the Potato at the SPCA book shop in Springfield. It charts our tuber’s 15 000-year story from the Americas to China and right through to McDonald’s.
My good friend Günter Grass, the German novelist and winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize for Literature, died last year, but not before he wrote moving references to our potato.
In The Flounder he writes: “Amanda’s potato peelings are the winding road to do-youstill-remember...” A bit higher grade, I know.
One of the simpler applications of the fried potato chip with hot chillies, tomato sauce and lashings of cheese is the divine special sandwich for all of R7 at Kara Nichas in the Bangladesh shopping centre.
I’ve been longing to introduce food-travel host of Girl Eat World and MasterChefSA, Kamini Pather, to that great street food, but alas I’m told she’s busy writing a cookbook. Watch this space.
• Higgins is on Facebook as The Bookseller of Bangladesh and on every first Sunday of the month at the Chatsworth Youth Centre flea market with tons of