The best way to cook a potato.

August 19 is - was - National Potato Day. While the last thing the world needs is another National ‘Day’/‘Week’/‘Year’ of something or other, that particular recognition of the potato was at least just an industry marketing ploy: few would be aware of it apart from a muster of farmers from Colbinabbin, Terang, or the Adelaide Plains at an industry conference in some regional convention centre where they talk Russett Burbank and Sebago and Dutch Cream by day and get drunk in the evening. Conversely, the United Nations takes a much more serious approach, marking its own International Day of the Potato in May: its webpage, virtually anthropomorphising the innocent tuber, features such arrestingly appetising gerund-led (of course) headlines as ‘harvesting diversity, feeding hope’. The UN’s ‘diversity’ invocation is not a plea for greater culinary variety - that would be far too mundane for the bureaucrats in New York, Geneva or Vienna. Leave that to the servant-class chefs.

But let's take it at face value: the potato is not an innately boring food, but its cooking technique often is.  Mashed potato, for example, is too often tuber assassination: a culinary cliche, a lazy conclusion, a commonplace, an afterthought. Pulverised half-heartedly with too much water and no butter and no salt and no pepper, and slapped on the plate as lumpy, watery, insipid mush. It’s not the potato's fault: familiarity breeds contempt. It could be whipped silky smooth; alloyed with butter, cream or olive oil; seasoned to umami perfection; or baked to a crisp outer, housing an inner of hot bliss. 

Doesn't take much trouble: the best potato I ever ate had been thrown into a campfire, retrieved later, had its charred shell cracked open, was then smothered with cold butter and showered with salt. The suddenly released steamy aroma - and the unctuous semi-burnt nutty earthy flavour tasted through the blanket of butter and salt - in the open air on a mild summer night under a star-filled sky would be enough to turn a carnivore into a lifelong vegetarian (if you'll excuse the butter).