Wrinkled potatoes

Writing about the elderly but entirely beautiful Lucinda (30 April) got me thinking about potatoes. She and the famous papas arrugadas of the Canary Islands share the precious gift of wrinkles.

More on that in just a moment, but first a little trumpeting: did you know that when the potato first travelled to Europe from the Americas, well over 450 years ago, it called in first at the Canary Islands? Oh yes. With the returning Spanish conquistadores. So we've got lots of experience with these things.

To be brutally honest, I'm not a big fan of potatoes. (Sharp intake of breath from passing Gomerans.) And in general, Gomerans choose their potatoes to yield bountiful crops rather than to tickle the taste buds. They tend to be the bog-standard, boring varieties familiar to any gardener or supermarket shopper in Britain.

I once thought I'd discovered a new and exciting import from Peru, a sack of potatoes in the market labelled QUINEGUA. They looked like very ordinary spuds, though… and after silently mouthing this intriguing name in Spanish - 'keen-EGG-wah' - I realised it was just how Spaniards get their tongues around 'King Edward'. Sigh…

However, I'm in dangerous territory here, admitting to less than ecstatic adoration of the potato. In La Gomera, the potato is sacred. No meal is complete without its potatoes in some form or other. And to be perfectly fair, there is an exotic and slightly more flavourful variety called the papa negra, black potato, and its close cousin the papa bonita, pretty potato, both of which look like something spat out by a volcano. They are also astonishingly expensive, so most people most of the time go for the boring old quinegua.

You can do a lot to liven up a boring potato, of course - just ask the French. But to start at base level, the easiest and unkindest method used in La Gomera is simply to peel, cut into pieces and boil. This is desperately unfair to the potato. Who could love a lump of steaming white stuff that tastes of water? Potatoes humiliated in this way are known as papas guisadas and are edible only if you drench them with the wonderfully simple sauce known as mojo (see Notes, below).

You will also encounter papas fritas of course, literally fried potatoes but this always means chips if you're British or French fries if you're American. There's nothing much to be said about papas fritas except that they usually turn out well if properly prepared in a restaurant kitchen but are often of the pre-cooked and frozen variety. This is not La Gomera's fault, it's a global malaise.

Better by far, though, are the papas arrugadas. Wrinkled potatoes. Foreigners go mad about them. Ask any departing visitor how their holiday has been and sooner or later they'll tell you how much they love the papas arrugadas (also known on restaurant menus as Canary potatoes). If wrinkled potatoes were all that this extraordinary island had to offer, people would still make return visits year after year.

They are very simple but slightly shocking to prepare. Choose some smallish potatoes - egg sized at most, preferably less - and wash them gently but do not peel or otherwise harm them. Think babies. Place them in a saucepan with just enough water to cover, then start heating it. Now add handfuls of salt.

No, not teaspoons or tablespoons - handfuls. Just to be sure that I'm not misleading anyone here, I asked one of the local taxi drivers, who knows about such things, how much salt he would add to a pan of potatoes. Handfuls, he confirmed. Something like a quarter kilo, 250 grams. You can use cheap cooking salt, coarse crystals rather than the prissy powders of table salt, because it will all dissolve. (In earlier days they would have used seawater, but that's nothing like salty enough to do a proper job.)

Boil for about ten to fifteen minutes, just enough but not too much or the potatoes will turn to fluff, then tip away the salty water. Agitate the pan a little as the remaining moisture evaporates and each potato will grow a splendid white coating of crystallised salt, sparkling like fairy dust. They should also look wrinkly-skinned, although older potatoes do this better than younger ones, just like people.

That's it. Papas arrugadas. Surprisingly they don't taste salty inside, but the salt water draws out moisture from within the potato and thus concentrates the flavour. Foreigners usually peel off the salty skin but Gomerans never do, they eat the whole thing.

Generously spoon mojo over the potatoes on your plate - see my recipe below - and there you have a potato dish that can proudly hold its head up among the world's finest, with none of the snobby pretention of pommes julienne or duchesse. Even I like papas arrugadas, so they gotta be good.

Notes for the serious student

Papas
In this part of Spain and some others, and in much of Latin America, the Spanish for potato is papa. This is also the Spanish for Pope. Just to confuse things further, if you add an accent - papá - and pronounce it pa-PAH, it means daddy. I'm sure there must be some common link in all this.

In other places the potato is the patata, but here that means sweet potato which of course is a bigger, even uglier root and full of sugar, so not to be encouraged.

Salt
Potatoes covered in salt must be bad for the blood pressure, surely? Well, maybe not so much in a warm climate like this, where you lose salt through perspiration. This might be a myth though, so perhaps don't eat too many papas arrugadas without peeling them. It's quite hard to stop eating them once you've started, like Jaffa cakes and Hobnobs.

Mojo
The sauce mojo (with the j pronounced like the ch in Scottish loch) comes in two basic varieties. Both start with olive oil and garlic but for mojo verde, green mojo, you add fresh coriander, mashing it with the garlic in a pestle and mortar. For mojo rojo, red mojo, instead you add sweet red pepper and a touch of cumin. It's also usual to add some red chilli pepper as well, which converts your mojo rojo into mojo picante meaning hot or spicy. Usually not eye-wateringly, but test with caution before ladling it onto your potatoes.

To these basic recipes people (and commercial brands) may add embellishments such as breadcrumbs to add bulk, water to form an emulsion, lemon or vinegar to add sharpness and various herbs or spices to add complication, but the more you add the further you move from the traditional, homespun Gomeran mojo.

Potato history
The world's potatoes seem to have originated in Chile and Peru, modern varieties being developed from both sources. They arrived in the Canaries with the conquistadores somewhere in the 1560s and from here travelled northwards to Spain, the rest of Europe and Britain. Kings and generals loved them because they were ideal for feeding marauding armies.

Where do all the carrots go?

She waggles the broccoli head towards me like a club. 'So what are you going to do with this?'

'Eat it!'

Facetious response. She is being serious. 'Claro, of course, but how do you cook it?'

'Well...'

'You boil it?'

'No, no... No!' Suddenly the accusation that I might boil broccoli, or anything, seems to demand strenuous denial. I sense an eagerness, an edge of discovery in this searching question from the market stall assistant, habitually a quiet woman who just gets on with the job.

'So what do you do with your broccoli?' she demands, pointing it at my heart.

It's not often I get the chance to expound our method of cooking vegetables - people tend to drift away - so I seize the moment. 'I chop it into small pieces,' I tell her with a chopping motion of the hand (Spanish requires whole-body communication) 'and cook it in a pan with a lid, adding just a very little water. So it steams, really. Then when it's nearly cooked I add a little olive oil.'

She nods approvingly as though I've passed a test. 'So you eat it as a salad.'

Well no, not salad. Or perhaps... yes, thinking about it. What she means is that we eat the broccoli as a food in its own right, not as an ingredient. That's right, I tell her: we eat it as a salad.

She places the broccoli on her weighing scales in satisfied silence. There's a feeling that we've touched on something fundamental here.

I've puzzled for many years over one of the most extraordinary aspects of life on this island. The place is full of fruit and vegetables, they grow them by the truckload, they sell them everywhere. There are four permanent greengrocery stalls in the local market and several more on Saturdays, specialist greengrocery shops in town and fruit-and-veg counters in every little supermarket. People emerge with shopping bags bulging with broccoli, carrots, leeks, green beans, peppers, tomatoes...

But as far as we've been able to establish, they never eat any of it.

Explain, please. Okay. Take a typical fiesta here in our village (see the story dated 6 October 2015) which largely revolves around eating and drinking. There is a conveyor belt of food that begins around midday and lasts all afternoon. First up is a rich stew of garbanzos, chick peas, in meat stock. Next come plates of fried pork, eaten with bread or just with more fried pork. Then chunks of goat cheese to be eaten with home-baked bread before the next course which is bacalao, salt cod, accompanied by potatoes boiled in their skins, Canary style, and served with the mandatory oil-and-garlic sauce called mojo.

No vegetables yet, you'll notice, unless you include potatoes. Now comes the prize dish of the day, fried goat meat eaten in French style with your fingers, off the bone. A palate-cleansing salad would go down well after that... but you won't get one unless you bring your own.

Then we're into the puddings, cakes and ice lollies.

Long ago we learned what to expect at these banquets and we prepare by cramming down salad and fresh fruit in advance to lessen the craving. In fact we have a reputation as lettuce-eaters. The other day, after a splendid fish dish in a local restaurant, the proprietor Jacinta said she’d told the cook to give us plenty of salad garnish because she knew we’d eat it. We left only the fishbones. This is almost unique behaviour, everyone else sends their plate back with the salad garnish untouched.

Yet the vegetable farmers and greengrocers here are thriving! They drive all-terrain vehicles with chromium-plated cow fenders and GPS navigation, they build palaces with orange-tiled roofs. They are selling all the fruit and vegetables they can pile up on their counters.

So where on earth is it all going?

Theory 1: The restaurants take it all

This is easily knocked down. You will never be served carrots, broccoli or any other vegetable with your fish or meat here, not even as an optional extra. It’s true that any restaurant will prepare you a wonderful mixed salad, a visual and gustatory delight, but it’s salad rather than vegetables and mostly the foreign visitors who order them. No, this can’t account for it.

Theory 2: The locals eat vegetables at home although not in restaurants

No, they don’t eat them at home either, we’ve been to lots of family meals and we have never glimpsed a dish of carrots. If there’s a salad it has been created especially for us. They do eat oranges.

Theory 3: It’s the resident foreigners who buy it all

Well yes, we foreigners buy fruit and veg of course, but there aren’t all that many of us. Simple observation at the market stalls shows Gomerans hugely outnumber foreigners.

Theory 4: It all goes into soups and stews

This is slightly more convincing. Soups and stews are very much part of the local cuisine - but can they possibly eat enough soup and stew to account for such quantities?

Theory 5: People take health-giving baths in vegetable soup, like Cleopatra bathing in milk

Don’t be silly.

Theory 6: They indulge in midnight vegetable orgies, crunching carrots furtively by candlelight in the kitchen

Nope, that’s us.

I give up, it’s beyond me. Perhaps the goats get it all, the ancient secret of Gomera's wonderful cheeses.