One potato, two potato, three potato – Cor!
THE POET W H Auden used to say – “no meal for an Englishman is complete without potatoes.”
I suppose it’s true these days that there might be girls and women who genuinely prefer pasta or even rice or cous-cous… and I can think of men who don’t mind eating these potato-substitutes (sometimes), but their inner Homer Simpson soon goes back to craving spuds.
They are irresistible and fascinating, hence:
And it’s just before Valentine’s Day…
One of the organisers is Brian Hesketh, who’s expecting Drimpton’s third annual potato day to be busy: “We have been quite surprised how well supported it was on the first two occasions, it seems to be meeting a need.”
Mr Hesketh has his own gardening blog covering the Dorset / Somerset borderlands near Drimpton (click here to link). “As gardeners,” he writes, in a philosophical moment, “we are amongst the stewards of Nature’s Life Support Systems, offering up not just tasty lunch time snacks, but also practical examples of sustainable methods, environmental awareness and harmonious living with nature.”
He publishes lots of appealing photographs, including this, an orb-like turnip amidst diamonds of ice: 
“Much easier to dig up than parsnips,” comments Mr Hesketh, as proved by this picture:
Which made me think of a fabulous essay by John Carey, called “Vegetable Gardening” in Original Copy (Faber, 1987). He writes about how “it’s an immense and exacting pleasure to grow” parsnips, and continues:
“Come the summer, you pull out all but one of the seedlings from each cluster – pale gold pencils, with feathery tops, which it always gives you a pang to throw on a compost heap, though there’s nothing else to be done with them.
“Then, as the winter approaches, the great spreading leaves of the survivors rot and yellow, and the parsnips withdraw into their subterraranean existence until, some time after Christmas, the time comes to crack the frosty crust over them and lug them out gross, whiskered and reeking, from their lairs.”
Isn’t that fantastic? Especially the last bit. If there’s a better passage ever been written about parsnips, I’ve yet to read it!
One final thing I would love to know if anyone has the answer: Why do parsnips sold dirty taste better than ones sold clean?
2 Responses to “One potato, two potato, three potato – Cor!”
Parsnips – I believe that it’s something to do with starches and sugars. The fresher (dirtier) they are then the less chance the sugars in the flesh have had to turn into not-so-tasty starch. So I’ve been told. I love parsnips.
more likely than not the dirty ones are organic? Either way, the earth probably keeps all the goodness in until you wash them? Or there might be a clever scientific answer!
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