My wife found the list in the back pocket of my gardening trousers. That ought to have been a clue, but she didn’t pick up on it. She marched into the study with an interrogative stride. ‘Who the hell are Mimi? Orla? Charlotte? Anya? Lady Christl!?’
I felt a pang of relief that she hadn’t found my ‘tasting notes’ as well. ‘Charlotte – firm, puts out well, nice finish.’
If my wife had been a gardener or an allotmenteer she would have recognised the names as varieties of spud. Still, I can’t blame her. The faintly porny air does persist, as do some mysteries. Mimi, for instance – a redhead, ‘small, but plentiful’ – disappeared suddenly some years ago and no one knows exactly why. Indeed, some dealers I contacted to ask what happened to her deny she ever existed, which is a sure sign of evil deeds. Of course, there are still lots of more familiar and safe-ground potato names out there: Golden Wonder, Sharpe’s Express, Epicure, as well as once-collectable rarities such as the wonderful Yetholm Gypsy.
The fussiness and faddishness of potato growers is legendary and the arguments are as intense and sectarian as those between egg-cutting Big-Endians and Little-Endians in Gulliver’s Travels. Waxy vs floury is the big schism. And the sprayers vs the non-sprayers – the now inevitable onset of blight reduces even the most sanguine of home-gardeners to the morose condition of an Irish peasant, c. 1845.
Time was, the traditional day to plant spuds was St Patrick’s or Good Friday. But the uncertainty of the climate and a paranoid but justifiable fear of that awful day, when one detects the first brown lesions and that fatal tang of blight, has meant that potatoes now go in the ground earlier or, perversely, much later. Early if your spuds are under fleece, later if they have been ‘chitted’ – sprouting in a tray, till the tubers look like thick white spider legs.
Growing potatoes is one of life’s acts of faith and certainly the first lesson in gardening for the young. I’ve never understood why children are encouraged to grow radishes. They’re not going to eat them. Whereas eating potatoes, nearly every child would agree, is one of life’s great and simple pleasures. One of the signs in The Lord of Rings that Gollum is beyond redemption is his disdainful rejection of Samwise Gamgee’s offer to fry ‘taters’ for him. A ‘good ballast for an empty belly’, says Sam. Only a pitiful, rotten creature, corrupted by the Dark Lord’s ring of power, would demand he ‘keep nassty chips!’.
For me, the delight of cooking a panful of tiny Mimis in ghee and fenugreek, with a touch of black salt at the end, may be gone, but I look ahead to unpeeled Maris Piper chips, Jansson’s Temptation (this is Olivia Potts territory) and to great piles of mash.
The list my wife found was an old one. Those trousers are dragged in for a wash very rarely, as tramps were once dragged off the roads, to be scrubbed and shorn. It was the equivalent of finding a very old address book. I’ve forsworn most of them, though I still miss Mimi terribly.
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