Aequam memento rebus in arduis . . .
The experiences of the writer as a potato grower have been somewhat mixed, and occasionally like the following:—Set your snowflakes in deeply-trenched, heavily-manured ground, a foot apart. In due time you will get a really fine crop of groundsel, charlock, and slugs, with enough bind-weed to strangle the sea-serpent. Clear all this rubbish off, and after a week or two the eye will be gladdened with the sight of the delicate green leaf of the tuber peeping through the soil. Slow music. Enter the Earl of Frost. No; they will not all be cut off. You will get one tuber. Peel it carefully, and place it in the pig-stye—the peeling spoils the quality of the pork. Throw the peeling away—on the bed in which you have sown annuals for choice—and in the late Spring you will have a row of potatoes which will do you credit.
But this is frivolous. The origin of the potato is doubtful; but that it was used by the ancients, in warfare, is tolerably certain. Long before the Spaniards reached the New World it was cultivated largely by the Incas; and it was the Spaniards who brought the tuber to Europe, in the beginning of the sixteenth century. It was brought to England from Virginia by Sir John Hawkins in 1563; and again in 1586 by Sir Francis Drake, to whom, as the introducer of the potato, a statue was erected at Offenburg, in Baden, in 1853. In schools and other haunts of ignorance, the credit for the introduction of the tuber used to be and is (I believe) still given to Sir Walter Raleigh, who has been wrongly accredited with as many “good things” as have been Theodore Hook or Sidney Smith. And I may mention en parenthèse, that I don’t entirely believe that cloak story. For many years the tuber was known in England as the “Batata”—overhaul your Lorna Doone—and in France, until the close of the eighteenth century, the earth apple was looked upon with suspicion, as the cause of leprosy and assorted fevers; just as the tomato, at the close of the more civilised nineteenth century, is said by the vulgar and swine-headed to breed cancer.
Now then, With or without the jacket? And the reader who imagines that I am going to answer the question has too much imagination. As the old butler in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone observes, there is much to be said on both sides. Personally I lean to the “no-jacket” side, unless the tuber be baked; and I would make it penal to serve a potato in any other way than boiled, steamed, or baked.[5] The bad fairy Ala should have no hand in its manipulation; and there be few æsthetic eaters who would not prefer the old-fashioned “ball of flour” to slices of the sodden article swimming in a bath of grease and parsley, and called a Sauté. The horrible concoction yclept “preserved potatoes,” which used to be served out aboard sailing vessels, after the passengers had eaten all the real articles, and which tasted like bad pease-pudding dressed with furniture polish, is, happily, deceased. And the best potatoes, the same breed which our fathers and our forefathers munched in the Covent Garden “Cave of Harmony,” grow, I am credibly informed, in Jermyn Street. Moreover if you wish to spoil a dish of good spuds, there is no surer way than by leaving on the dish-cover. So much for boiling ’em—or steaming ’em.
The Cabbage is a fine, friendly fellow, who makes himself at home, and generally useful, in the garden; whilst his great heart swells, and swells, in the full knowledge that he is doing his level best to please all. Though cut down in the springtime of his youth, his benevolence is so great that he will sprout again from his headless trunk, if required, and given time for reflection. The Romans introduced him into Great Britain, but there was a sort of cow-cabbage in the island before that time which our blue forefathers used to devour with their bacon, and steaks, in a raw state.
“The most evolved and final variety of the cabbage,” writes a savant, “is the Cauliflower, in which the vegetative surplus becomes poured into the flowering head, of which the flowering is more or less checked; the inflorescence becoming a dense corymb instead of an open panicle, and the majority of the flowers aborting”—the head gardener usually tells you all this in the Scottish language—“so as to become incapable of producing seed. Let a specially vegetative cabbage repeat the excessive development of its leaf parenchyma, and we have the wrinkled and blistered Savoy, of which the hardy constitution, but comparative coarseness, become also more intelligible; again a specially vegetative cauliflower gives us an easily grown and hardy winter variety, Broccoli”—Broccilo in Costerese—“from which, and not from the ordinary cauliflower, a sprouting variety arises in turn.”
In Jersey the cabbage-stalks are dried, varnished, and used as spars for thatched roofs, as also for the correction of the youthful population. Cook all varieties of the cabbage in water already at the boil, with a little salt and soda in it. The French sprinkle cheese on a cauliflower, to make it more tasty, and it then becomes
Choufleur aû Gratin.
Remove the green leaves, and underboil your cauliflower. Pour over it some butter sauce in which have been mixed two ounces of grated cheese—half Gruyère and half Parmesan. Powder with bread crumbs, or raspings, and with more grated cheese. Lastly, pour over it a teaspoonful of oiled butter. Place in a hot oven and bake till the surface is a golden brown, which should be in from ten to fifteen minutes. Serve in same dish.