Root Vegetable

At first rich, then intensely warm and piquant, this is a perfectly balanced salad for accompanying fish or maybe a grilled steak. It is just the job with freshly dressed crab or smoked trout or eel. The potatoes should be warm when you dress them, and eaten within twenty minutes or so, giving them time to soak up the flavors but not dry out. If you are dressing the salad in advance, I suggest you make a double quantity of dressing.

The stuffed baked potato, that bastion of comfort eating, given a contemporary treatment.

Good with lamb.

If you crush a cooked potato with the back of a spoon or fork, its broken edges are receptive to any dressing you wish to drizzle over it. Cream and garlic is a rather sumptuous treatment for a virginal new potato, but it works very well.

I had heard about Golden Wonder, the rock-hard potato with a deep honey-brown skin that roasts like a dream, but only came across my first a year or so back, at the farmers’ market. Hard as ice and crisp white inside, the golden one turns out to hate water and will turn to soup if you attempt to boil it. Give it olive oil, butter, or goose or duck fat instead. This is the potato for frying in little cubes with rosemary and salt, and for French fries. If you plant Golden Wonder in April, and are lavish with the water, it will reward you with charming, snow-white flowers flushed with palest lilac and, come September, perhaps the best frying potatoes of all, to be finely shredded and cooked in a flat cake with goose fat and garlic.

Young potatoes of any sort roast sweetly, especially if scrubbed hard so their skin almost disappears and they are allowed to develop a sticky, golden coating in the oven. They need a few minutes in boiling water before they hit the oven if they are not to toughen as they roast. I match them with robust ingredients—slices of fat-flecked salami or perhaps a spoonful of softly fibrous pork rillettes—as a Saturday lunch.

This is the classic accompaniment to duck confit, though I make it all the time—as a side dish for baked mushrooms or a steak, or sometimes as a main dish in its own right, in which case I make a salad too, perhaps with frisée or green beans.

Baking a big piece of meat or a large fish on top of a layer of potatoes is a reliable way of ensuring they stay moist. The juices from the roast are soaked up by the potatoes, making sure that not a drop of flavor is wasted. Large fish such as sea bass and sea bream can be cooked in this way, as can Cornish mullet. Line-caught, ocean-friendly sea bass is not too difficult to find. I reckon on a 2-pound (1kg) fish being enough for two.

Goat cheese—sharp, chalky, a little salty—makes a sound addition to the blandness of a potato cake. The fun is coming across a lump of melting, edgy cheese in among the quietness of the potato. This is what I eat while picking eagle style at the carcass of a roast chicken or wallowing in the luxury of some slices of smoked salmon. It also goes very well with a humble smoked mackerel.

The affinity between potatoes and parsley is usually demonstrated by tossing new potatoes in butter and the chopped herb. I like to take it one step further and put the parsley in a soft, almost sloppy purée of potatoes. It excels as a side dish for white fish.

I love buttery, cloudlike mash but sometimes I want something softer. I use a floury-textured winter potato beaten with butter and hot milk to produce a snow-white mash suited to mopping up the juices of winter recipes. The quantity of milk will depend on the level of starch present in the potatoes, so I simply stop adding the warm milk when I have the texture I like.

Rice has for centuries been the obvious contender for stuffing a pepper—and indeed eggplant or a beefsteak tomato—flavored with caramelized onions, golden raisins, and musky raisins, and seasoned with capers, anchovies, cinnamon, or cumin. Small grains—cracked wheat, brown rice, the underused quinoa—are eminently suitable fillings, as is any type of small bean, lentil, or the plump, pearl-shaped couscous known as mograbiah. Vegetable stuffings can set the pepper alight. Piercing, cherrysized tomatoes, such as Sungold or Gardener’s Delight, or chunks of sweet steamed pumpkin offer more than just jewel colors to lift the spirits. They have a brightness of flavor very different from the humble, homely grains. They offer a change of step. A few hand-torn chunks of mozzarella and some olive oil will produce a seductive filling. Ground beef, the knee-jerk filling, somehow makes my heart sink. Mograbiah, sometimes known as pearl couscous, takes the idea on a bit, having the comforting, frugal qualities of rice but possessing an extraordinary texture, poised between pasta and couscous. Made of wheat and similar to Sardinian fregola, it is available at Middle Eastern markets.

Anyone who has shelled a bag of peas will know how good they are raw. Far too little is made of their scrunchy sweetness, and I put forward the pod-fresh raw pea as an idea to throw into salads of pale yellow butterhead lettuce, cracked wheat, or dishes of cooked fava beans. They work in their uncooked state only when very young and small. Old peas are mealy and sour. One rainy lunchtime in June, I put them into a simple salad of Peter Rabbit lettuce, crisply cooked smoked bacon, and hand-torn ciabatta. The result—restrained, refreshing, and somehow quintessentially English.

At the top of the garden, past the sunny stone terrace, the little beds of vegetables and the unruly shrubs, is a thicket, less than ten feet (three meters) deep but just enough to give the whole garden an unkempt, relaxed feel. Here lie the compost bins with their lids of rotting carpet, green plastic bags of decaying leaf mold, and four small trees of damson, hazel, mirabelle, and a King James mulberry—the latter being a “guardian” tree planted in the northernmost corner to protect the garden from the north wind. In between grow drifts of snowdrops, wild garlic sent by a friend from Cornwall, and fraises de bois, with which this garden is littered, and whose flowers twinkle like tiny stars in spring. The work in this part of the garden is mostly done in winter, if only because the leaflessness of the trees makes it possible to see what you are doing. It is always dark and cold here, and damp, too. I come in from turning the compost or cutting hazel twigs with my feet like ice, my fingers numb. Invariably it’s a Saturday, when I have been early to The Ginger Pig for my sausages. I leave them to bake with parsnips and stock. A slow bowl of food, which often sits patiently until I come in, too chilled to the bone to do anything but eat.

It is often worth introducing some sort of richness to vegetables with a heart of starch. Ideal suitors include butter, cream, bacon fat, and honey. Jane Grigson suggests cheese, often in the form of Gruyère or Parmesan, as do others, who have been known to roll a stiff parsnip mash in grated Parmesan and deep-fry it as a croquette. To this list I add my own, a shallow cake along the lines of a pan haggerty (potatoes and onions topped with cheese), made with thin slices of the root layered with grated cheese and herbs. Parsnip haggerty, anyone?