This Modern Writer: Ethel Rohan, Potatoes

If you don’t know Sean Lovelace is in love with nachos, where are you? His obsession is bordering on perverse. Someone stage an intervention. What you can’t know is that I share a similar, but more restrained, passion. A fixation that also maketh my stomach spilleth over: the potato. How sadly stereotypical, an Irish cailan and her praita, but it’s true. I am in love with potatoes. I have eaten a potato every day since the tender age of six months. I will take my potatoes any way and in alarming portions: boiled, mashed, baked, roasted, fried, au-gratin, deep-fat-fried. I have never eaten a raw potato—

I do not recommend raw potatoes, too much crunch and soapy starch. Cooked potato is my comfort staple. Chocolate is my indulgence staple. My oldest daughter shares my potato fixation. My husband and youngest daughter hate potatoes. At least the teams are even. Every day, I insist on cooking too many potatoes for dinner, infuriating my husband. I don’t seem to know how to do potatoes unless the pot is full to the brim, a bad habit carried over from childhood. I grew-up in a family of eight. We were working-class and potatoes were cheap. Every day, an enormous pot packed with potatoes sat on our stove. It’s not a particularly happy memory: our hunger and greed, how awful those dried-out, white-turning-green, we-know-our-fate, potatoes looked, and yet I still love the potato. Few things (I will not expand) satisfy me more than potatoes mashed with kale cabbage, milk, butter, salt, and pepper, a traditional Irish dish we call colcannon—

I highly recommend colcannon at any time of day or night. The potato is ugly though, isn’t it? That lumpy, bumpy shape. The dusty, dirty brown skin. Those gnarly roots that sprout like maggots. Pink and black eyes. I cannot eat a potato unless I’ve gouged-out all its eyes. Any hint of green under that skin and my potato is tossed to the compost. My potatoes must be white, virginal, blemish-free. I am a potato snob. Have you smelled a rotten potato? I’ve entered gentler portaloos. They are also a chore to peel and wash. More, I cannot have escaped our people’s psychic scars from the Great Famine. Yet still I adore the potato. Amazing really. I sometimes wonder how I would be changed if I stopped eating potatoes. Just stopped. I would need help, of course, a twelve-step program. But what if I ceased the daily practice? How would my life, my writing, be changed? Would both suffer? Improve? The thought is both terrifying and electrifying. If you notice significant change in me or my writing in coming months, you’ll know what’s happened. You’ll know how to fix me too, if needs be.

No, that’s crazy. I can never forsake my potato. Indeed, I herewith launch a campaign to elevate the potato to its rightful place in the food chain. I will make the potato fashionable and highly desirable. Au courant. I will stage the potato’s comeback, return it to the glory it enjoyed in the Elizabethan era. I will lobby Congress to ban Mister Potato Head and all his clones as sacrilegious. Perhaps I should start by stalking celebrities, snap them while they eat potatoes. Can you imagine what it would do for the potato’s stature if Brangelina plus six were caught consuming said vegetable, preferably mashed versus French Fries? Praise be. Hell, even getting Sean Lovelace to endorse the potato would be enough to put it into the Food Hall of Fame. He and I could co-declare March 18 as International Potato Day; create potato recipes as fresh and boundary-breaking as his writing; and take photos of potatoes in all kinds of compromising positions, much like Amy Winehouse’s wedding album. With Mr. Lovelace’s backing, the potato could be elevated to a delicacy, and the Irish at last revered throughout the world for their centuries-old good taste.

Please stay tuned for more details on my launch of the potato into stardom, and be sure to mark your calendars for March 18, International Potato Day. The cogs in my brain are turning so fast right now my eyes are spinning. To take myself down, I will retreat into a corner of my kitchen with my beloved potatoes. Darling potatoes that I will undress, primp according to my will, and devour. The less discriminating? Let them eat cake, or nachos.