Food Heroes

16 Culinary Artisans Preserving Tradition

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• Publisher: Stewart, Tabori & Chang
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781613125687
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Culinary Arts

In Food Heroes, Georgia Pellegrini introduces readers to the lively stories of artisanal food devotees such as New York mushroom forager Marion Burroughs, French fig collector Francis Honore, fish missionary Jon Rowley in Washington State, and Ugo Buzzio in New York City, one of the last makers of traditional dry-cured sausages in the United States. Filled with colorful anecdotes, photographs, and recipes, this book offers an accessible introduction to the artisanal food movement, and vicarious living for armchair travelers, food lovers, and others who might wonder what it would be like to drop everything and start an olive farm, or who yearn to make and sell their own clotted cream butter. Thirty-two fantastic recipes follow the profiles, and encourage readers to find their own local suppliers.

The Potato Breeder

It begins at the gates of a carriage house in Sligo, Ireland, where the air smells like roasting cumin. It takes place in the gardens of Lissadell House, inside four ancient brick walls that hold the largest tuber collection in the world. Up a wooded dirt road I go, the Irish Sea crashing against the shoreline at my back. And there David Langford awaits, his hands clasped neatly behind him, a silver goatee flattering his satisfied smile.

The limestone walls are gray and tired; they hint at a former comeliness tarnished by time. This was once a distinguished horticultural estate, and now Lissadell is climbing back to its place in history. On the way, Lissadell found Langford, a man who, like his potatoes, is able to thrive wherever he is deposited.

He has spent his life nowhere and everywhere, from the Arctic to the Antarctic, and all around the “Med.” Though born an Irishman, he spent his life with his father, ensconced in the British military; he moved thirty-eight times as a child and nineteen times as an adult. Along the way he found himself looking at spuds, very strange potatoes, and was fascinated by them.

Many years later, he is finally stationary. He lives in a two-hundred-year-old house with its original flagstone floors, bog oak beams, and grand fireplace. And he spends his days at Lissadell, tending to 180 varieties of rare potatoes. The spuds now come to him; strangers send them from around the world—often varieties lost in one culture are found in another. Each new tuber that arrives in his mailbox is a time capsule, a reflection of someone’s personal history. Here he plants them for everyone, one of only three men left in the world on a mission to preserve dying potato varieties and put them back into national collections. Norway, Holland, Russia . . . they arrive, and he dutifully tucks them into the garden, six inches deep under a blanket of soil.

He stands effervescent over a table full of potatoes nestled in wicker baskets in shades of pink, purple, gray, and brown, and exclaims, “I’m a great lover of traditional everything. My whole family loved old things. My mother’s people were carpenters, and made furniture. We weren’t a rich family, but we always had fine things about us that had been made in workshops.” He reaches down and turns a potato tenderly in his thick palm. “Seventeen seventy,” he says. “See how many eyes?” The potato looks like a tired old man, full of little wobbly bits, but weathered in a noble kind of way. “I’m a great believer in traditional cookery. I cook right back to the seventeen hundreds.” His singularly perfect meal is roasted potatoes mixed with apples, onions, and one sage leaf, with an accompaniment of roast pork.

It has been a wet summer in Sligo. The temperate, misty climate stirs the silhouette of W. B. Yeats, a Sligo boy, who played cricket matches on this verdant grass, kicked around the oyster beds behind the shore walls, and evoked its beauty and genius in his poetry. A friend of the heir to Lissadell, Eva Gore-Booth, he slept here from time to time, often relegated to the carriage house where guests stayed when the main house was full. Victorian greenhouses still perch a few steps away on the outskirts of the two-and-a-half-acre kitchen garden, home to cherry tomatoes and baby greens with precious names like Ruby Streaks and Golden Frills. Then, as now, this is one of the foremost potato-growing places in the world. When the Great Hunger arrived in the nineteenth century, famine relief was provided to thousands inside this place. From here “peace comes dropping slow,” Yeats said. “I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore, I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”

Through the wooden gates beyond its weathered walls, the kitchen garden is like the secret garden, a mossy, magic plot where twenty-nine varieties of lettuce mingle with nine types of basil, and a few steps away those 180 potato varieties are planted chronologically by date, two tubers every three feet.

We walk the trimly carved paths: I, Langford, and Dermot Cary, the head gardener. They are an odd pair: David short and stocky with a tidy silver beard and well-worn fishing vest, Dermot tall and thin with wispy locks. They banter in a thick Irish brogue about types of potatoes, flavors, facts, likes, and dislikes. David calls Dermot “a man of the soil.”

David kneels to inspect his potatoes, then talks about them expressively as if they are his girlfriends. “Arran Victory are a gorgeous spud. They’re a wonderful baked potato. They’re a purple, purple skin with a lovely white flesh . . . floury . . . they make lovely everything. And they make the most wonderful roasters when you roll them in goose fat.” He bubbles over with knowledge and optimism, becoming dreamy. “And the Highland Burgundy Red, it’s a lovely pink. Beautiful pink chips and pink mash. . . .” He trails off wistfully, as if contemplating a lover.

Dermot, more staid, makes his rounds, the pebbles crunching like a good lettuce under his feet. For him, each potato carries significant history, and also challenges. These varieties are rarely seen in stores because heirlooms aren’t as efficient to grow commercially. “You have factors like yield, disease resistance, taste, shelf life. Commercial growers have to compromise to grow on a large scale. I’m lucky because I can take them from the ground and put them right into our store.”

David adds, “People ask me, ‘why can’t I get these varieties in the market?’ And the answer is because commercial growers don’t want to put in the effort to grow them! It’s a shame. We are depriving people of great taste!”

He tries his best to disseminate heirloom potatoes, encouraging and helping others to grow them. He was giving one of his talks recently and a man about eighty years old came up to him and told him he’d been trying to find a potato from his childhood called Hadrian’s Heel and asked him if he’d come across it. David had never heard of it. A few weeks later someone sent him three tiny spuds, each the size of a thumbnail. They were labeled “Hadrian’s Heel.” “I sent them to him, and his wife tells me that he carries the potato spuds around with him all day in a bucket to keep them in the sun. To me it’s so worthwhile. That’s why I’m so passionate about it.”

David’s potatoes are a reflection of personal history, each one the essence of a particular time and place. Very few people in the Western world still eat real potatoes, he says plaintively. Microwavable mashed potatoes are among the most popular potato products in the United Kingdom; one can squeeze them out of a tube like lumpy toothpaste.

“In a survey of schoolchildren in Yorkshire, sixty percent thought potatoes came from trees. Over ninety percent couldn’t identify a leek. Most had never seen cabbages and didn’t know what chard was. Now, that is appalling!” he says, animated. “You know, I’m old, I’m getting past it. The reality is when my generation goes, a lot of the new generation won’t have a clue what to do with this stuff. If they can’t buy it and microwave it, they’re going to starve.”

As part of his mission he teaches people how to grow potatoes in a garbage bag. Three spuds in a bag yields up to twenty pounds of potatoes. “Look,” he says to his cadre of potato apostles, “get three potatoes that are a different variety than you’re used to, and put them in a bag, and at the end of the year, try them, and if you like them, grow a row!” And the apostles dutifully return to him, delighted. “Try that. Fantastic,” they say. Potatoes will grow at elevations from zero to fifteen hundred feet, and are flexible in varying climates. But they don’t like to be grown in the same place twice, which is why David grows his in forty-liter pots that he puts right into the ground. It keeps the varieties well separated. And because they are so old and rare, he adds clean compost every year to reduce the chance of disease.

Disease has plagued the potato throughout history, which is why the potato has morphed into so many varieties, every potato the descendent of a single primordial spud. As they succumb to blight they change and reform themselves into newer versions. So while old potato varieties provide a historical timeline, the true glory of the potato is that it is naturally evolving. The older the variety, the more dimples or “eyes” it has, and as we crossbreed, the eyes disappear, leaving an array of shiny, smooth-skinned spuds.

We descend now into the centuries-old root cellar where wooden crates of potatoes live with exquisite little pears. David calls himself a “potato nut,” and Dermot a “rotten devil,” as they banter and sift through, in search of a particular tuber. “Arran Victory,” they say in collective swoon. “Purple skin . . . with very light flesh. Those explode to absolute flower,” David sighs. Then comes the Easter-egg pink Sarpo Mira. “I wouldn’t torture my enemy with them! That’s horrible, it’s vile!” Then the low-carb Vivaldi. “That’s called the slimmer’s potato because it has one third the carbohydrates of the others, but a potato is not fattening unless you stick a lot of butter in it.” Then the Pink Fir Apple: “Those are good salad potatoes because the flesh doesn’t crumble.” And then the one that makes his skin crawl, the Bambino. “If I have a show I have a tag that says, ‘This is the worst potato I’ve ever tasted.’ If you boiled it today for an hour, steamed it tomorrow for two hours, roasted it for a week, you wouldn’t be able to eat it. It’s vile! Absolutely, disgustingly vile. If you mashed it, oh my God, you could build walls with the results!”

The range of potato textures varies from “waxy” to “floury.” Salad potatoes like the Pink Fir Apple are waxy, and stay together when cooked. They have a nutty flavor and are the style most favored in Britain. The Irish prefer a floury potato, which can disintegrate and absorb a lot of butter. If not cooked properly these potatoes have a floury taste. David’s personal favorite is the floury Golden Wonder, a potato from 1916. “It is amazing how different countries have different preferences,” he says. “England likes a wet waxy type potato like King Edward and Maris Piper, whereas Ireland likes the floury types like Rooster, Record, and Kerr’s Pink. The French prefer waxy types, the Scots floury types and so on. Each type has its merits for different types of cooking, the wetter waxy type are good for chips. The Maris Piper is the one that most chip shops use in Britain and Ireland, whereas floury potatoes are perfect for mash and roasting.” The most popular to come out of Lissadell today is the tan, smooth-skinned Orla. But it is hard to find these lovely things, because no one wants to grow them. It is easier to grow a few standard varieties and sell them en masse. Worse still, the average nonorganic potato is sprayed with trichloro dichlorophenyl ethane eighteen times in the field and nine times in the store to fix small cuts and fungus, which means the perfect-looking potato is sprayed twenty-seven times before it gets to the plate.

In November 2008, David flew to Rome to talk to the United Nations about spuds, after the United Nations declared 2008 the International Year of the Potato. David joined the International Potato Committee in order to get more third-world countries to grow more potatoes in place of rice, maize, and barley. Throw a potato into a fire and you have a meal—no milling or processing required. With more nutrition in potatoes per acre, it is one solution to food shortages. Convincing people to incorporate the potato into their diet is the challenge, since it is not inextricably linked to the cultures and palates of some countries. But the potato’s popularity is rising in third-world countries while declining in wealthy ones. Fast-food chains, trans–fat–laden potato chips, and frozen French fries make it increasingly difficult to convince children in developed countries to eat potatoes that have not been heavily processed. And it means the beauty and variety of full-flavored heirlooms is rapidly disappearing.

Inside the carriage house we sit sipping tea and eating warm ginger cake, a bucket of beautiful spuds next to me. “Is there anything outside the spud world?” David says buoyantly, peering over the rim of his spectacles.

“I was giving one of my talks recently and afterwards a one-hundred-year-old man came up to me. He had his son with him, who had his son with him, who had his son with him. The oldest son asked me, ‘Can the old man hold the potatoes?’ I said of course. He told me about the varieties of potatoes that his father and grandfather used to have. At the end I asked, ‘Would the old man like to pick ten varieties to take home with him?’ And he did. A few months later the potatoes prompted a family reunion and all the brothers and uncles came together from around the world. They called me from the party and said they were all sitting around the table in tears reflecting on two hundred years of their family’s history with the potato. It dated back before the famine. Now that’s worth it, isn’t it?”

The room smells of cleanliness; the stone floors, walls, shelves, and all th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Potato Breeder
• 2. Smoking Hog
• 3. Seeing the Forest for the Fungus
• 4. A Brewmeister in a Sea of Beer
• 5. Fighting for Salami
• 6. Healing with Olive Oil
• 7. The Seed Saver
• 8. Hans and the 50,000,000 Sisters
• 9. Finding the Beautiful Taste
• 10. Between Sky and Earth, There Is Cheese
• 11. Butter Poetry
• 12. The Chocolate Pioneer
• 13. Sanctified Tamales
• 14. The Persimmon Masseuse
• 15. Close Your Eyes and See the Whiskey
• 16. Fig Heaven
• A To-Do List from Me to You
• Those Who Have Captured My Heart and Imagination
• Conversion Chart
• Recipe Index
• Index of Searchable Terms
• Acknowledgments