Haunted by Potatoes
From underground and dirty, with eyes all around
Idaho is all about potatoes, or at least that’s the local ambient joke.
Just off the plane in Boise we are confronted by a tarmac poster reading: “We dare you not to think about potatoes while you’re here.”
I was up to take that bet, because I have never thought about potatoes in my life, and neither have you. A potato is so singularly uninteresting that “think about potatoes” is a Buddhist’s kōan: an unsolvable riddle designed to set your mind to a state of blank readiness. Readiness to receive potatoes.
But just for a moment let’s see what happens if we actually do think about potatoes.
Potato Thought Number One
I resent the attempted erasure of potatoes by the sweet potato industry.
When a hard-working standard French fry loses its job to a lurid orange sweet potato fry, everyone pretends to be delighted. Oh hooray, you guys, these aren’t regular tater tots, these are sweet potato tater tots.
Sweet potatoes are a superfood, somehow, while actual god-fearing potatoes are a garbage ration fit only for the Irish.
So I’m to understand that the tuber with a higher sugar content is somehow a healthier carbohydrate? This paradox is only explicable as an insidious psy-op from a sweet potato marketing cabal.
Don’t confuse me with the facts. Wake up sheeple. Potatoes are better than sweet potatoes in every conceivable way.
Potato Thought Two: The Dao of Home Fries
Potatoes are supposedly the simplest thing in the world, a food product that any dummy could pull out of the ground and turn into breakfast. But it’s so common to find them flaccid or greasy or otherwise unappealing.
I think all of us are kind of on a life-long quest for a breakfast restaurant where the home fries ain't completely horrible. You know what I'm talkin' about. I know cooks at breakfast restaurants ain't usually too well trained but dang I have seen some messed-up home fries in my day.
Major Problems of Restaurant Home Fries
1. There is no commonly agreed upon definition of "home fries"
2. There is no agreed upon size for "home fry" cubes
3. Some people apparently think home fries need to be extremely gray and soft
4. No one seems to agree what should be thrown in with home fries (i.e. onion, bell pepper, garlic, etc.) or how they should be spiced
5. I have even seen home fries where the potatoes were somehow chewy. Once you make a potato chewy you are doing things so wrong that you would be better off just not touching the potato at all, and instead giving it to the customer so that he could take it home and try to make sense of it himself.
I learned to cook, as I once told you, by learning to make home fries from the recipe/jeremiad quoted above. I spent so much time trying to figure out those little potato dice that by the end of the process I had a modicum of skill, and thus a little hobby on my hands.
Hobbies, I think, keep one sane, stave off the aging process, repel vices, and generally make one a happier and more interesting citizen. You should learn how to do a thing which is not the thing which you do for a living, if only to be more engaged with the world.
Oh so you’re a heart surgeon? God bless, I’m sure your mother is very proud. But you also play the clarinet and raise prize-winning begonias? Come sit next to me.
The Road to Potato Mastery
Now we have those little supermarket fingerlings at least once a week, halved and roasted up in olive oil and salt on a sheet pan, sometimes with rosemary or thyme if there’s room on the cutting board, but that’s gilding the potato’s lily. Well-cooked potatoes don’t need tarting up to be the tastiest bite on the plate.
On special occasions I’ll coax pommes purées through a ricer, or braise fondants in stock to compliment if not outshine a holiday roast. And a gratin, especially Kenji’s hasselback version, is, with a gun to my head, my favorite thing to eat in the world.
When I make one I just want to yell at the guests to go home so I can eat it by myself, straight out of the Le Creuset. Shut off the lights on your way out, try not to look at me.
For our most recent New Year’s dinner we tried a Pommes Anna, which was prettier than it was tasty (my fault, the center was slightly underdone) but as potatoes go it was very pretty.
A Band of Potatoes
The night after we got home from potato country we went to see Devo at the Paramount with Nick and Emily. I bought these tickets months ago because that’s how live music works in these dark days. I hadn’t thought about Devo in awhile, and had forgotten their obsession with potatoes.
[Jerry] Casale happened to stumble upon one of Mothersbaugh’s postcards and soon approached him, asking “Are you the guy putting astronauts holding potatoes up around campus? My name’s Jerry Casale. I wondered what your interest in potatoes was.”
From there, they got into a long, philosophical conversation about potatoes, humans, and the hierarchy of vegetables. After all, Mothersbaugh always believed potatoes were the “proletariat vegetable.”
“They come from underground and they’re dirty but on everyone’s plate,” he says. “People ate potatoes every day regardless of where you are on the hierarchy, but they never thought about it. They had eyes all around, so they saw everything going on.
“Both of us come from working-class families, so we thought of ourselves as potatoes. We’d interchange the word ‘spud’ with ‘comrade’ and would use it pejoratively and as a ‘welcome comrade’ type thing. ‘Hello spud!’”
From Spin Magazine: ‘Hello Spud!’: How a Conversation About Potatoes Ultimately Led To Devo
Potatoes, man. I’m up to my damn neck. My whole May is turning out to be about potatoes.
Also the show was a blast. These guys look like retired math teachers and they just rock your face off with Happy Days-era punk anthems. If these songs were written today they would seem sour and gross maybe, a product of gnarly 4chan culture. But Devo are singular geniuses from another time and place, and they basically invented their own vibe. What would any of my other favorite songs sound like without the influence of Gut Feeling, Gates of Steel, or Girl U Want?
If the tour is coming to your town, you should go. I was two years old when this band formed, my god. My musical taste is going backward. Devolving, one could say.
Anyway… Back to Boise
The other big joke around town is a sort of aw shucks deference. “I’m sure this big building looks pretty quaint to you New Yorkers,” etc. “I bet this vape shop looks goddamn pathetic next to the one in Times Square.”
I chuckle along, but this act makes me feel like a big city dick. It’s the out west version of spiky Midwestern niceness. That said, it was pretty adorable when we walked up to the Idaho State Capitol building, on a Saturday afternoon the last time we were in town, and found the doors unlocked and nary a soul nor security guard inside. We walked around a bit, past all the state official’s offices, and we respectfully used the bathroom.
My mom has lived in Boise for nearly a decade, and to my shame I hardly know the place at all. We spend a lot of time talking and hanging out indoors when we are in town, so I don’t have much to say about Boise itself. On our previous trip we toured the charming Basque quarter there, and the Old Idaho Penitentiary: the spooky ruin of an old west prison that closed after 101 years in 1971, and which the current administration is probably planning to rehabilitate.
In Boise’s bohemian downtown district there’s an art deco theater, like in most bohemian downtown districts. There are tastefully lit and reasonably-priced menswear shops, there are colorful wall murals, and there are food trucks selling the sort of stuff you can get from food trucks anywhere in the country now, and probably in Dubai and Tokyo and Marrakesh by now, too. This global culinary plague was designed as a desperate means for the restaurant industry to survive the predation of the modern real estate market, ending the customary dignity of eating from a plate, or at a table. And now food trucks are a novelty. Comfortable people think it’s fun to eat a meal standing up in a parking lot, somehow.
We went to an upscale coffee shop, where as expected the crullers had the usual mildly surprising ingredients. Next door was a nerd store with a replica Tardis from Doctor Who, and a guy in a top hat gave us a fairly hard sell on some Magic the Gathering cards, but I was just thinking about how he pays his rent.
Hey wait, is the rent reasonable here? Can a two-story nerd store survive in a bohemian downtown district? Maybe this little city is clowning on us. Or maybe this guy is just crazy.
And doesn’t Doug Martsch from Built to Spill live around here somewhere? He must, because his signature is on all the copies of There’s Nothing Wrong With Love in the pretty great, cavernously large, non-corporate record store we wandered into.
We also drove to a nearby winery in the Snake River Plain, where we spotted a pronghorn antelope trotting alone beside the unpaved road that we shared with dirt bikes and dune buggies. I was too amazed to get a picture in time, so here’s one from Wikipedia:
I’d never seen an animal like that outside of a zoo, and this one was hanging out a thirty minute drive from Mom’s house, its presence transforming Idaho into an African savannah.
A dorm room print of Un bar aux Folies Bergère hung over the bar at the winery, and my flight of light reds was aggressively adequate, with two rare lamb chops with fries and chimichurri for under thirty bucks, a better deal than I’ve seen in a long time. Also wait, isn’t this where Evel Knievel jumped the Snake River?
And contrary to stereotypes there do seem to be some people with compassionate politics in Boise, just like there are everywhere, even if they’re usually outvoted or gerrymandered out of relevance. What must it be like to be one of those people here? Maybe kindred souls in towns like this bond faster, because there are less people overall, so if you meet someone cool, who you share something with, you probably feel a sense of urgency to value that and take advantage of it. Is that a better way to interact with other humans than the one I’m used to, where the polite thing to do is pretend that strangers don’t exist?
Who knows. I’d never make it in Boise. I’m a Westerner by birth, from Colorado, and I’ll always have affection for a mountain range around the horizon, and for big lakes and rivers, and dry plains dotted with horse farms.
But I’ve also got some ghosts here. These vast pale Western skies on quiet Sunday afternoons take me directly back to being seventeen, popping Prozac in the high school parking lot, The Head On The Door on the cassette player in my ‘78 Nova. Not my favorite part of my life. I’d rather feel like current version of myself, the guy who is an alien here.
Am I a potato? yes or no? Am I a potato? Yes or no?