Tubular belles

This week, I write about the essential, life-giving properties of potatoes, a friend for cold days, plus I share a recipe for hachis Parmentier.

If you’re a new subscriber (hello, I love you) and you want to find out what these weekend posts are about, I wrote an introduction here.

The first time I ate hachis Parmentier was in a small café in Carcassonne about twenty years ago. I don’t know if I could ever find it again. Maybe it no longer exists. It was the perfect place: linoleum tiled floor, Formica tables, banquettes around the walls, tubular steel chairs with red vinyl seats, the day’s menu written on a chalk board. That day, the set lunch was a slab of pâté, hachis Parmentier, crème brûlée, and a glass of red for 12 Euros.

I was with my mother. We often used to travel together in those days, before life became too complicated for that. She was my perfect travelling companion. We like the same things. Watching people, trying to get under the skin of a place, interspersed with afternoons of reading side by side, on twin beds, occasionally reading bits out to each other. She always wants a room with a table so she can write. I always want a bathroom with a tub, for essential wallowing and thinking.

The only area where we differ is that my mother has no interest in food and I always want to eat my way into a place, a culture. Travel for me is social anthropology with knife and fork.

It was May but it was cold and we didn’t have the right clothes. Inside, the café was warm, loud with conversation as office workers, builders, elderly couples, women with small children ate their lunches. I ordered the set lunch for two. My mother sipped her wine, picked at the pâté and bread distractedly, as we talked.

By the time the hachis Parmentier arrived, she’d lost interest. I should have know really. As someone who spent many years as a primary school teacher, she has a particular aversion to anything that resembles school dinners, and hachis Parmentier, the French equivalent of cottage pie, is most unashamedly that. The waiter looked at the almost entirely untouched dish and asked if there was something wrong with it. I said there wasn’t, she just wasn’t feeling well which in that moment, felt like the only explanation I could offer.

Antoine Augustin Parmentier, with his bouquet of wheat, corn and potato flowers. Portrait by Francois Dumonth the Elder in the Versailles collection.