Thank you, baked potato
One of the hardest things about being a January baby, aside from going 11 months without presents and everyone always being too poor and sad and abstemious to come to your birthday drinks, is that you’re on the losing team from the off. Borne out of comedown and carrot juice. You feel obliged to defend January all the time (hey hey, that’s my MONTH you’re trash-talking) with only that notorious April-basher, TS Eliot, for solidarity.
But I think one of the gifts of the January baby, aside from an icy-cool demeanour and ability to communicate with polar bears, is that we’re better on the whole at riding those four weeks through. We relish the admin, the clean-slateishness of it all. But we also know that the first month, like the eldest child (oh hi) can only achieve so much before it burns out and disappoints everyone. Ask too much of January and you’re just going to end up sad, feeling like a failure.
No — you need to warm the year up gently, like soup. A dose of ambition and a dash of ambivalence. A bit of resolve here, a glass of Resolve there. And where other people wake up to each frosty morning breathing misery, you have to look for the joy.
So far I’ve been finding the joy mainly in potatoes.
When my boyfriend and I got back to London on Sunday night after 10 days of solid Christmassing in Scotland and Sussex, the kitchen was still a hungover mess. Gone-off double cream and half-eaten Christmas pudding, mouldy carrots and After Eight wrappers. A bottle of Bailey’s where the milk should be. Not a scrap of kale to be had. But then in the cupboard we found three kilos of potatoes — only very slightly tentacled! — and decided to make them our January project.
We’ve been working through the potatoes every evening; patiently, methodically. We’ve applied ourselves to the potatoes the way other people do to their FitBit targets and French lessons — graduating up through the levels, pushing ourselves and our waistbands a little further each time. First boiled and buttered, then in a traybake, then on a fish pie under a thick crust of cheese.
We weren’t sure at first that we were up to the challenge (“can we really do a third evening? Don’t you want to just give up and have courgetti?”), but do you know, it’s incredible what you can achieve once you set your mind to it. We believed we could, and so we did! And afterwards we’ve even felt energised enough to put the electric blanket on and watch an hour of Netflix before falling asleep.
I know this might just be the starch talking, but I think potato is my most joyful food. Or at least my most joyful January food, which is really a much higher accolade.
Potatoes are the perfect January food because they’re a friendly, stodgy reminder of December (coo-ee, it’s us! Remember, from Jesus’ party? And… er, the day after? I know mate, totally mashed! How’ve you been?) but also plain and humble. You can’t eat proper Christmas food in January, it’s far too Miss Havisham. It tastes of gone-off grandeur. But potatoes, they’re just the ticket — padding for your plate, your belly and your soul.
In fact if I could only eat one type of carb for the rest of my life it would be potatoes. I’d have them sautéed for breakfast, baked for lunch, bedded down with smoked haddock and mustard sauce for dinner. Chips for second dinner. Hula hoops as a midnight snack. Dauphinoise on Sundays, saag aloo on Friday nights. 32 birthday candles, stuck in a big Maris Piper.
When esteemed writer and friend of this newsletter Dolly Alderton asked me once in the back of an Uber what my favourite way to eat potatoes was, I panicked. “Mash!!” went my brain. “No! Don’t say mash! You’re not Bodger and sodding Badger, say something better! Hasselback, SAY HASSELBACK.” But if I’m honest, it’s the nursery-level fluff that excites me the most. Mash and gravy, mash and poached egg, mash and cheese. Come the apocalypse, I want to be in Brasserie Zedel with a Champagne bucket of buttery pommes purée and a ladle.
It’s hard to balls-up potato — impatience is about the only thing that can go wrong. Impatience and not enough salt.
Besides, it’s not as though new year’s resolutions and potatoes are so very incompatible. The peeling, the prepping, the waiting for them to soften or crisp; it’s all mindfulness, of a starchy sort. And you can still pile on your green veg, your legumes and your fart-making proteins — spuds are an excellent carrier carb, allowing the most noxious of ingredients to slip in barely detected. Bubble and squeak has taught us that.
So while January might feel like a great long finger-numbing, 31-day joy vortex, I say all we really need to conquer the month is a project. An achievable goal. Like a sack of spuds approaching their use-by, and the sheer determination to succeed. I choose potatoes. I choose life.
This essay was originally published in the email newsletter Schmancy!, by Lauren Bravo and Daisy Buchanan.
