Circle M Farm

To atone for my recent disparaging comments about Julia Child’s grayscale “Potato Show,” I pulled out “Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1” and made her wonderful Potage Parmentier this week. Thank you, Madame Julia, for the world’s easiest and most romantic-sounding Potato Soup.

“Leek and potato soup smells good, tastes good, and is simplicity itself to make,” says Julia on page 37, and she’s right, as usual.

3 to 4 cups or 1 lb peeled potatoes, sliced or diced
3 cups or 1 lb thinly sliced leeks, including the tender greens; or yellow onions
2 quarts water
1 Tbsp salt
4 to 6 Tbsp whipping cream or 2 to 3 Tbsp softened butter
2 to 3 Tbsp parsley or chives

Simmer the vegetables, water and salt together, partially covered, for 40 to 50 minutes until the vegetables are tender. Mash the vegetables in the soup with a fork, or pass the soup through a food mill. Correct seasoning. Set aside uncovered until just before serving, then reheat to the simmer. Off heat and just before serving, stir in the cream or butter by spoonfuls. Pour into a tureen or soup cups and decorate with the herbs.

Lovely. Couldn’t have been easier to double and serve to my family and guests. However, I do think it could have tasted better. Truth is, it didn’t taste a whole lot at all and I think that’s because by-and-large the potatoes we eat don’t .

In spite of the fact that nature has provided us with a cornucopia of potato varieties, suited to myriad soils and elevations and suitable for all manner of cooking and storage situations, we in America tend to grow and eat two. Three or four if you live in a big city near a large grocery. At our little corner store out here in rural Wisconsin, we can purchase red boiling potatoes and russet baking potatoes. In Madison, a nice grocer will also have Yukon Gold and French Fingerings. A Whole Foods will have a few more. Sometimes near the 4th of July, you can get blue potatoes to mix with your red and white.

The potato originated in Peru, and thousands of varieties still persist in the Andes, where over 100 varieties can be found in a single valley. Individual families there often grow a dozen or more, and with good reason. A quick survey of offerings in just a handful of heirloom catalogs here in the states reveals a startling world of potato personalities, including those with such tempting names as Rose Finn Apple, Island Sunshine, Gold Cloud and Purple Viking. Descriptions include information on maturity rates, size, texture, flavor and storage longevity. Some “waxy” varieties are touted for boiling, other “creamy” varieties for mashing, “dry” varieties for baking and “mealy” ones for frying.

Another important nugget of information buried in the potato descriptions is resistance to various diseases. Since they are not native to either here or Europe (or Asia where China is the largest grower of potatoes in the world, and India is second), potatoes are highly susceptible in these climates to disease and fungi. When the potato was introduced in Europe in the 1700s, just a few varieties were brought. This lack of genetic diversity left crops vulnerable to disease, and in 1845 the fungus known as late blight spread quickly through poor communities in Western Ireland and created the Great Potato Famine.

Could be we’re set up for pretty much the same sort of thing globally right now, barring the contributions of third world subsistence farmers and artisan market growers, and not just with potatoes, but corn, too. Mechanized planting and harvesting require that varieties be chosen for size uniformity and ability to hold up during shipping, over taste or texture or intended use. So we have long brown potatoes and round red potatoes.

In Julia’s “Salad Nicoise” episode of The French Chef, she takes the viewer shopping to the open-air market in Nice. There she talks at great length with vendors about their various potato offerings, explaining what she wants to do with them and getting advice about which is the best. In front of every farmer are artfully arranged boxes and baskets of gorgeous vegetables. In back are pull-carts filled with more over-spilling boxes. As Julia moves from one to the next, the farmers tenderly lift and caress the fruits of their labors, extolling the virtues of each one like familiar friends. Once upon a time, small “truck” farmers on the outskirts of every town planted rainbows of row crops and brought them in to feed the cities – much like vendors in the growing farmer’s market movement today. That’s the sort of knowledgeable, colorful and in-love kind of farmer I want to be!

Last spring I planted seven varieties of heirloom potatoes and by early summer we were eating baby bright-skinned Dark Red Norlands and Adirondack Blues. After gently reaching into the mounds and grabbing out a few new potatoes each day for a month, I decided the prudent thing was to leave the plants alone to make more and bigger tubers that would cure and store come fall. Unfortunately, August floods buried my entire potato patch in 3 feet of water. Twice. All the crop diversity in the world couldn’t save them from ruin.

But I’ve just ordered my seed potatoes for this spring’s planting, and hope that this year we’ll enjoy both an early and late harvest. First, we’ll unearth some small Dark Red Norlands to fry for breakfast with eggs. Next, we’ll have purble Caribe which are just the thing for soup. A month later, we should be finding some big Purple Vikings, pink-tinged and extra fluffy for baking, followed by skinny long Fingerlings with excellent flavor for roasting in olive oil. As fall comes on, we’ll be able to harvest Butte and Nugget russet-types to store for winter eating, as well as very dry Green Mountain and Red Cloud for marvelous mashed potatoes with our Thanksgiving meal.

Of course, the snow will have to melt before we can tuck the sprouted eye pieces into their furrows, but that’s got to happen sooner or later. In the meantime, there are other seeds to order and to start.