Imperative cooking: useless potatoes and tomatoes
BEFORE Easter England was full of Egyp- tians. They are cheerful enough, I suppose, and pleasant enough to look at with their light brown, earthy skins, but they are of no use to anyone. Who invites them all I can't say. They are good for nothing. And they have no taste at all. Then come Jersey Roy- als. They do have some taste but at silly prices. The first Cypriots are also here. They have been getting better. Finally there will be the English earlies. But however much or little taste all of these have, there is not one with a waxy texture. And waxy potatoes are indispensable for salads and for those old French dishes such as andouillette which were always accompa- nied by a solitary pomme vapeur.
Elizabeth David complained about the lack of waxy potatoes some 40 years ago. Things have changed since then but not for the better. Actually the change is rather interesting and a good example of what has happened to food in England more gener- ally. When she wrote, the greengrocer shops offered two potatoes, Whites and King Edwards. Both were useless for our purposes. Now the supermarkets offer a bewildering variety. There are Cara, Wiljas, all sorts of Pilots, Charlottes, lots of Pent- lands — all useless. By the way, what silly names they all have. And indeed that is the problem. As so often with food in cool, modern, go-ahead Britain, it is a variety of the same thing. The whole idea of variety is not just to have different names but differ- ent tastes and textures for different dishes.
Already I can hear rumblings as some disgruntled fan of one of the silly names starts bleating, 'Has this Anderson never tried Pink Fir Apples?' Indeed he has and the fact that someone thinks they are waxy is further proof of the problem. Waxy does not mean merely that the potato does not crumble, it refers to taste as well. No, PFAs will not do. And for some bizarre reason neither will the Rattes which are sold here. I've tried them bought in shops and planted them myself.
The persistent, obstinate refusal of the shops to sell and the customers to buy and cook waxy potatoes illustrates perfectly the stupidity of the claim that British food is now top-class: you can't even buy a good potato, or a good 'Spanish' onion. These have actually got worse. There is no equiva- lent of French Lezigian onions, not even something approaching the American Vidalias. Often the so-called Spanish onions have soft and strong segments which slip out when the onion is pressed for cut- ting. Sometimes they have green shoots at times of the year when no self-respecting onion should. In any event they are either strong and leave a foul taste in the mouth when eaten raw, or they taste of nothing. The violet ones, sometimes called Italian, are worse.
It's the same story with tomatoes. You can buy whopping beef ones and tiny cherry ones, round ones and plum ones, single ones and ones 'on the vine', red ones and yellow ones, tomatoes from Holland (the absolute worst), tomatoes from Spain, Italy, Morocco and Worthing. For some reason Worthing is distinguished from the rest of England which also produces tomatoes. Again, the varieties for sale and planting are endless. But, like the spuds, few are any use. Most are poor in taste, but even some of those with taste, such as the Canaries, do not have the necessary fleshy texture for salads. Tomatoes consist of flesh, juice, pith, pips and skin. There are many avail- able with lots of skin, pips and pith. Some have good juice. None has the right flesh and flavour.
Take a simple, classic dish. I learned to make salade nicoise watching a French grandmother doing it in Bouzigues near Sete in 1961. The basic ingredients in the version she did were potatoes, onions and tomatoes. Eggs, anchovies and tuna and olives were the finer and more expensive ingredients. It is absolutely typical of English shops and English customers that we can now make our nicoise with six vari- eties of extra virgin, olives of more varieties and from more countries than Grandmere ever knew, fresh tuna flown in from half the globe and the finest of anchovies. But you still can't buy the basic necessities, the right sorts of spuds, toms and onions. She did the potatoes in a pre-soaked earthen- ware diable so they half steamed, half baked. Subject the dictionary of current spuds to that and none would survive with the correct waxy texture and taste. Add watery, pithy tomatoes and acrid onions and all the refined anchovies and tuna will not save the dish from disaster. After half a century of British culinary revolution, we can't even make a salade nicoise. Some rev- olution!
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