The UK is meant to love its spuds. However, most of the specimens on sale are duds.
The range of potatoes in supermarkets seems to have shrunk in terms of diversity. Is this variety floury or waxy? To which cooking purpose is it best suited? Such considerations have been sidelined for one key attribute: size.
Visually, pink-skinned varieties are about as exciting as it gets in most stores. They’re the only apparent point of difference in a sea of bland, white, modern varieties, overpopulated by the Maris family.
Baby potatoes clog the shelves even though they reliably fail on flavour, sharing with their larger relatives a watery flesh and a sweetness more suited to a dessert.
In this respect, they are perhaps simply trying to keep up with the trendy sweet potato, which has colonised the potato category by tickling the British palate’s soft spot for sugar.
With the better-than-average Rooster variety, Albert Bartlett shows that relatively modern varieties can have some character. And come Christmas, more upmarket chains will feel obliged to put a few celebrated heirloom varieties on their shelves to cater for the nation’s annual dip into nostalgia. You might even spot some Red Duke of York or King Edwards.
But otherwise, it looks as if all aspirations to provide genuinely varied taste and texture have been squeezed out of the potato offer.
I have had limited success in markets and indie greengrocers on the spud front. The French still show commercial loyalty to traditional varieties, such as La Ratte. I recently bought some purple-fleshed French potatoes, which had all the flavour the UK equivalent lacks.
When I lashed out £4.99 for a kilo of organic Jersey Royals, thinking their variety and production method would create more dry matter and therefore more taste, I was sorely disappointed. Same story when I picked up some Pembrokeshire Earlies while passing through Wales. Come autumn, there’s the hope of some decent Pink Fir Apple in farm shops. But these are exceptions.
I suspect the curse of the British spud is that it will be forever ‘humble’ – doomed to be seen as a dull necessity that is cheap, evenly proportioned, and easy to prepare.
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