All hail the potato, the most accommodating and unifying vegetable on your plate

Unlike cottage cheese or tofu, this vegetable has a distinct yet unobtrusive flavour. It is so good that you can fry it and sprinkle it with a bit of salt. It soaks up the flavours of other ingredients it is cooked with without affecting their taste at all. Add to this the fact that it is inexpensive.

In France, pommes can be enjoyed in multiple ways, as in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland. It is truly the vegetable that binds us together.

Of course, in Bengal, we take this tuber-love to another level because moderation has never been a Bengali trait, especially when it comes to all things gastronomical. We add potatoes to most dishes — fish curry, kosha maangsho (slow-cooked mutton curry), mixed vegetables like pumpkin, parwal, cauliflower, and most importantly, our biryani. Calcutta biryani is one of the few biryanis that includes a giant half of a potato, boiled in the meat stock. It is so desirable that biryani joints like Shiraz will sell you an extra alu in your biryani at Rs 15 a pop.

This vegetable has a distinct yet unobtrusive flavour, unlike cottage cheese or tofu. It is so good that you can fry it and sprinkle it with salt. (Photo: Freepik)

Given the Indian love for potatoes, one would think they were indigenous to India. They are not. The Dutch brought potatoes to India, having first introduced them to Europe from their settlement at the Cape of Good Hope. It is recorded that around 1830, potatoes were being grown on terraced slopes in Dehradun by Captain Younous and Mr Shore, the same gentlemen credited with developing Landour and Mussoorie.

Initially, only Europeans and some Muslim households in India consumed potatoes. In Maharashtra, the word batata for potato traces back to early confusion with sweet potatoes, which Jesuit priest John Gerard referred to as batata in his 1597 English botanical writings. There is still some confusion in historical documents on whether the potatoes mentioned in records in India – from dinners given in Ajmer by Asaf Khan to Sir Thomas Roe in 1615 – were sweet or true potatoes.

What is certain, though, is that there is no replacing the potato in Indian kitchens and Indian plates now. From puri alu to batata vada to alur dum to even serving potato peels fried to a crisp – the alu is here to stay and rule the vegetable roost. And I, for one, am not complaining about the popularity of this common denominator in the country.

Next week, I’ll write about a unique ingredient in Bengali food—the fish head—and share some recipes.