Food & Drink

Change up the way you cook spuds with a grated potato cake and Swedish dish, Jansson’s temptation

Potato recipes from Neil Forbes, plus Rose Murray Brown on the best of Beaujolais

Flicking through Mrs Beeton’s One Shilling Cookery Book, I see a lot of potato recipes and one catches my eye. A potato pie. Simple, starchy and filling. And that got me thinking. One of the crazy things we used to do when I was cooking in kitchens as a young lad was to try to memorise all the different potato dishes from the Repertoire de la Cuisine –a bible for many of us at the time. A bit dated now, but back then it was a vital book for classic French cookery. Duchess, Lyonnaise, dauphinoise, parmentier, gnocchi, chateau, rosti. Hundreds of ways to cook the humble tattie.

We have been eating a lot of potatoes in Scotland for a couple of hundred years – before that we relied on oats and beremeal as staples. The tuber became part of the everyday diet from the mid 1700s until the mid 1800s when the potato blight hit Ireland and much of Scotland.

Crofters and smallholders went without and many starved, such was the importance of the potato which we now all take for granted. By the late 1840s the tuber was eaten in 95 per cent of the parishes of Scotland. Folk in the north east consumed the largest amount of potatoes, using them in soups, broths or stovies.

It was a simple life, with a proper diet of oats, cheese, kale, soup, bread, onions, fresh unpasteurised milk and potatoes. Meat was scarce but we had herring or white fish occasionally. Maybe we have too much choice now and the limited diet is not such a bad thing after all?