For years I used to buy potatoes from John in Inverness Street Market, in Camden Town, north London. His produce was good. His main crops – “old” as opposed to “new” potatoes – cost as little as 40p a kilo. And there was the choice: “reds”, “whites”, Edwards, “salads” (potato-speak for small, washed, waxy and evenly sized) and, for a few favoured weeks around now, exquisite little kidney-shaped Jersey Royals, one of the few potato varieties whose name is protected and has its own logo and brand guidelines. (Just as in France potatoes grown on the Ile de Ré have an appellation d’origine contrôlée.)
But then I discovered Tom, the man behind Morghew Gourmet Potatoes, an organic operation in the Rother Valley, near Tenterden in Kent, which grows 12 named varieties and sells direct from its gate, as well as at farmers markets (Marylebone is the one I cross Regent’s Park to patronise). And suddenly my loyalty to John was gone. Tom’s potatoes had a revelatory depth of flavour, provenance and quaint names. Suddenly they seemed not just an accompaniment but a meal in themselves.
Tom Lewis, however, is not your average horny-handed son of soil. He made his money as co-founder of the Aim-listed technology PR company Next Fifteen Communications, from which he retired last summer to concentrate on potatoes, having acquired the 2,000-acre Morghew Park Estate from Tetrapak magnate Hans Rausing in 2001.
But for an entrepreneur, perhaps his change of career is not so strange because obscure varieties of potato – what they call “heirloom” in the US and “heritage” in the UK to denote varieties developed pre-1950 – are suddenly big business.
According to research published by Mintel this April, sales of organic potatoes in Britain reached £24m last year. Meanwhile, overall spending on spuds has reached £855m a year, an increase of 20 per cent since 2001, prompted by a growth in demand for variety.
Traditionally, the British potato industry has focused on just four types: Maris Piper, Cara, Record and Pentland Dell, which account for half of all maincrop varieties. Now, however, even the supermarket chain Waitrose stocks up to 18 kinds of potato, depending on branch and season, including such rarities as Mr Bresee (which mash well) and purple-skinned Shetland Black vintage.
It was Pink Fir Apples that first converted me to the joy of paying five times more than I used to for potatoes. Morghew charges a heady £4 for a 2kg bag, but you won’t get them for love or money till October because this season’s crop is finished. (Potato snobbery keeps you in touch with the seasons.) Rare and revered, these long, thin, knobbly tubers look more like Jerusalem artichokes or galangal, and they have an intense, sweet, slightly nutty flavour and a dense waxy texture.
In her 1960 book French Provincial Cooking, Elizabeth David, who regularly lamented the dearth of decent potatoes in Britain – “It is not good potato recipes we lack in England, it is good potatoes” – gives the details of a seed supplier for what she calls fir apple pinks, suggesting the only way to find them was to grow them yourself.
Given the prices they command, they could be a shrewd investment: the Fife-based seed merchant Alan Romans sells a kilo of Pink Fir Apple seed potatoes for £2.85, though their expense is due to this late-maturing variety’s reputation as a low yielder. “A century ago, Suttons had four Fir Apples – large white, small white, red and pink, origin unstated,” says Romans, author of possibly the definitive encyclopedia of potatoes, The Potato Book (Frances Lincoln), who stocks 96 varieties, from Accent to Yukon Gold. But only the pink has survived. “They fry surprisingly well,” Romans adds, “and decadence is making chips from individual tubers!”
With Pink Fir Apples over, and this year’s Jerseys (which I’ll buy from John) still scarce, I am enjoying Morghew’s Nicola, a pleasingly egg-shaped waxy variety, and Linzer Delikatess grown by David Watson of Middleton, Suffolk, which I buy from Reckford Farm Shop, also in Middleton, a store that admirably credits all the farmers it buys from.
And I’m looking forward to the arrival of Cherie Red, a flattened oval ruby-coloured salad potato; and Blue Congo, a variety Morghews describes on its website as having “blue flesh as well as blue skin, and can be mashed and piped on to shepherds pie to give it a bit of colour.” Just a gimmick? “Probably.” Though it’s worth noting that the Inca were thought to have cultivated blue and purple varieties, similar to the rather mealy one now known as Gem of the Andes.
Inevitably the renewed interest in obscure varieties of potato is also being driven by chefs and their increasingly prescriptive recipes. Where once ingredients lists distinguished only between waxy and floury – the latter have a higher water content and are therefore more likely to disintegrate when cooked – now they specify varieties. Heston Blumenthal reckons the optimum variety for mash is workaday Maris Piper, but that “nothing beats the Golden Wonder potato” for chips.
Gordon Ramsay, in his book Secrets (Quadrille), writes: “There are three secrets to a velvety smooth pomme purée. The first is the choice of potato. You need one with a good flavour and a floury texture, such as Desirée or King Edward.”
For pommes dauphinoise, however, “you need a waxy variety that will retain its texture as it absorbs liquid such as La Ratte or Maris Piper”. Anna del Conte, the doyenne of Italian cookery writers, suggests red-skinned Désirée or pale yellow Estima for gnocchi.
“For the thousandth time, why, why, why, I ask, do we, the English, the pioneers of European potato cultivation, now grow such uninteresting potatoes?” wrote Elizabeth David in a 1986 postscript to her book Eating Out in Provincial France. They come at a price, but there’s no denying that potatoes are more varied and more flavoursome than they used to be.
Posh potatoes
Alan Romans, tel: +44 (0)1337 831060, www.alanromans.com
Morghew Gourmet Potatoes tel: +44 (0)1580 766866, www.thepotatoshop.com
Reckford Farm Shop tel: +44 (0)1728 648253
