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Potatoes

The scent of potatoes, steamed with butter, Czech-style! Brambore! I used to think the name came from brumbari, the Colorado potato beetles that would infest our potato crops. Whenever that happened, terrible curses could be heard coming from the garden. Fuck you and your Coloradan whore of a mother, Grandpa would hiss through his teeth while running toward the cellar, where he was brewing up a hellish concoction for their Coloradan whore of a mother.

Our cuisine was influenced by the Czech tradition and cumin was always generously sprinkled on cabbage and potatoes.

The potato has a peculiar structure: smooth and hard when peeled, yet when given the right treatment, it can become quite fluffy. The secret of Czech potatoes is in the cutting, the amount of water, the temperature, and the shaking.

Czech Potatoes

Take a pound of potatoes, one and a quarter sticks of butter and a half-teaspoon of whole cumin seeds.

Cut each medium-sized potato into four or five large pieces. The water should reach to three-quarters the height of the potatoes. Add a little salt. Crank up the burner at first, let the mixture boil for about five minutes, then reduce it to the lowest heat. Cover with a lid. This steams the potatoes, opening their cells and making room for the butter. When the water has almost boiled off and there is less than half a centimeter left in the pot, it’s time for the whole cumin seeds (or dill, if the potatoes are fresh). Where there’s butter, there’s always room for seasoning. And now comes the time for the shaking. Grasp the pot firmly by both handles and the lid and shake it, letting the shaking start from your ass and flow throughout your whole body like belly dancing. The pot ends up on the periphery of the shaking, where the vibrations are more delicate, exactly right for steamed potatoes swimming in butter. Keep shaking and exhale downward toward the earth through your legs, because otherwise you just might fly off somewhere right along with the potatoes-and after such scents that just wouldn’t be fair to the hungry inhabitants of the house. Return the pot to the heat for a few seconds to let it bubble up again and then repeat the shaking procedure several times, so that the fluffiest upper layer of potato collapses, laying bare new space for the butter to seep into. Czech steamed potatoes go well with salad, but are also a wonderful side dish for oven-baked cabbage, fish, or meat. Steamed potatoes are especially well suited to chicken livers with onion (Grandma’s recipe again).

Chicken Liver with Onion

Take three medium-sized onions, a pound of chicken livers, four medium tomatoes, black pepper, butter, and two hot peppers.

Sauté the onions in butter along with the finely chopped hot peppers until they grow pink. Add the chicken livers, cut in half or smaller, then stir them with the onions for just a few minutes before adding the already-thickened sauce from the grated tomatoes. Follow by adding black pepper and salt, and let it all simmer together for three more minutes.

Grandma’s potato secrets were inexhaustible. After exploring the sea and the dunes all day, there was nothing more lovely than catching sight of her grating potatoes. That meant batz, a type of Czech potato pancake.

Batz

Mix a cup of milk with four medium-sized grated raw potatoes, four cloves of garlic, parsley, two eggs, a dash of baking soda on the tip of the spoon, salt, and flour. Keep adding flour until the mixture resembles thin porridge.

Then Nikula would get out her big black frying pan and set it on the fire. She’d add a splash of oil in the bottom and two ladlefuls of the mixture. We would fall silent, our eyes fixed on the pancake and the deft movements with which Grandma tossed it into the air. Batz!

We batzed ourselves silly until we flopped on the couches in a stupor, listening to Radio Sofia. Whether it was folk or classical music, we completely trusted the taste of our one and only radio station.

Despite the fact that some nations completely despise the potato as a boorish food, given my experience in mastering Czech potato traditions (which are, in fact, German) I’ve continued to perfect the art of cooking this tuber. Years later, I’m building again. My husband and I are restoring an old village house in the southern Rhodope Mountains and I’m still experimenting with potatoes from my very own garden. The first local recipe I try is

Arse-End Potatoes

In the Rhodopes Arse-end potatoes are still cooked in the traditional way, in an earthenware dish. It is crucial to get your hands on such a pan, with low sides and a thick bottom, glazed, if possible. Peel the potatoes and cut them in half lengthwise, put a spoonful or two of oil in the bottom of the pan, and arrange the half-potatoes with the arse-end up. Sprinkle them with a thread of oil, salt, and a little paprika for color. Bake them in a preheated oven for around ten minutes until the tops grow rosy, then place them over a low fire. This fries the potatoes from below, bakes them on top and steams them in the middle. A delicious reddish crust forms on both sides, while the inside turns to purée.

Over the years, after planting my own rosemary, I’ve elaborated on this recipe. I now grease the bottom of the pan with olive oil and sprinkle it with crushed rosemary needles. I cut the potatoes lengthwise, into slices no more than 8 mm thick, and arrange them like roof tiles. On top, I add another thread of olive oil, crushed rosemary, and a pinch of hot red pepper to make them smile. The baking principle is the same as with arse-end potatoes. Afterward, it’s like eating Bibles: with your fingers, page by page-the scent of a shrine, of holiness.