In the world of anthropomorphic vegetables, potatoes loom large. For Americans, there is Mr. Potato Head of the blushing ears and startled eyebrows, the first toy ever featured in a TV commercial, in 1952. Early versions included face parts, felt hair and accessories (hats, glasses, pipe) but no potato; you had to provide your own. Investors initially feared that the toy would be seen as being in bad taste, not because turning potatoes into people is an eerie pastime but because the memory of wartime food shortages was still vivid. It seemed wrong to encourage wasting something that could make a meal.
Recipe: Potato Pete’s Potato Scones
Across the Atlantic, another little spud addressed precisely this issue a decade earlier. Potato Pete was the star of a recipe pamphlet distributed by the Ministry of Food in Britain during World War II, offering ways to stretch rations of flour and butter. More rakish than his American cousin, he sports a floppy hat, a piece of straw in his mouth and a giant fork slung on his shoulder (as much as a potato can have a shoulder). “Good taste demands I keep my jacket on,” he says on one page, a wink with a pragmatic motive: Cooking potatoes in their skins yields more “goodness and bulk,” the accompanying text explains. Readers are urged to eat a pound of potatoes every day, “if possible.”
A scone born of scarcity, but consumed with abundance in mind.
Potato Pete was no preacher of austerity. In the midst of deprivation, he promised indulgence, happily surrendering himself into the hands of cooks, ready to be boiled, steamed, mashed, roasted, baked, fried, scalloped, deviled and stuffed. The British historian Eleanor Barnett, whose smart, high-spirited account of food waste and preservation over the centuries, “Leftovers,” came out this year, was particularly curious about his recipe for teatime scones: It was a surprising treat given that at some points during the war, ice cream was banned — the Ministry of Food suggested, crushingly, eating carrots instead — and Britons were allotted as little as eight ounces of sugar a week. (Not to mention, and perhaps more devastating for the British soul, just two ounces of tea.)
In Barnett’s kitchen, the scones proved at once decadent and sensible, rescuing old mashed potatoes that might have otherwise been destined for the bin. Using the potatoes, she was able to get by with smaller amounts of flour and butter — about half of what a typical scone recipe might call for. There was less of a rise, as potatoes lack gluten and thus can’t create the long, elastic strands of protein that trap air and bring buoyancy. But the extra starch gave the scones softness and a delightfully tender crumb. Richer still, out of a limited batch of ingredients, you got enough scones for two to a serving, sandwiched around your choice of filling: a sweet slather of cocoa powder, sugar, butter and a dash of milk, evoking cake frosting, or a quick savory slaw, with onion chutney to liven up some shredded cabbage and that almost-ice-cream, carrots.
Although the fillings required some experimentation, Barnett found that Potato Pete’s recipe was fairly straightforward, unlike ones she has tinkered with from the Reformation era in the 16th century, whose instructions could be as opaque as “cook for as long as it takes to say the Lord’s Prayer,” she says. Even more difficult are the kind of ornate dishes once served at regal feasts whose edibility was almost beside the point, like a 17th-century chef’s pastry stag that bled wine when an arrow was plucked from its side, accompanied by disemboweled eggs filled with rosewater, which he hoped female guests would pelt gleefully at one another. Wastefulness may be a symptom of modern life, as we grow more distant from our food sources, but our ancestors, or at least the ones higher up the social ladder, could be careless, too.
For the scones, Barnett notes that when it comes to the leftover mashed potatoes, a Briton’s expectations are likely lower than an American’s. “Not super buttery,” she says. “Just boil and mash.” Still, if all you have on hand — in the weary wake of Thanksgiving, perhaps — is the ultrawhipped, velvety, one-third butter to two-thirds potatoes variety, embrace life. Potato Pete would want nothing less.
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