Have you ever eaten new potatoes — potatoes
with skins so thin they scrub off easily with a vegetable brush, with flesh
so lusciously creamy, it’s almost decadent? You might be surprised to
learn that potatoes labeled “new” in the supermarket usually
aren’t. Real new potatoes should be recently dug — anything more
than a few days to a week old doesn’t qualify. New potatoes have
recently made their annual reappearance, a sure sign of the beginning of
summer. “Have you tried these?” a woman standing next to me at
last week’s farmers’ market asked as she looked at the basket
of pingpong-ball-sized Yukon Golds in front of us. “I swear,
they’re so good it’d be worth the trip downtown even if there
wasn’t anything else here!”
Potatoes worth a special effort? You bet. Potatoes
are mostly taken for granted — a substrate for anything from gravy to
catsup. They’re America’s favorite vegetable, mainly in the
form of not-very-good french fries. As fast and convenience foods have
taken over, instant mashed potatoes and frozen french fries have become the
norm for many. Their blandness may be unobjectionable, but, as the saying
goes, there’s no there there. Because potatoes are the ultimate comfort food, good
restaurants now often showcase freshly made mashed or smashed potatoes and
properly made skin-on French fries, knowing that customers will swoon when
they experience the real thing. New potatoes are the ne
plus ultra of potatoes. When cooking,
they should all be roughly the same size so that they cook evenly; this may
mean that some are cut and others left whole. Steaming is best, because no
flavor or nutrition is lost, as it is in boiling. Serve them simply, with a
little butter and salt and freshly ground pepper to taste, plus a little
parsley, if you like — or you can melt the butter in a skillet and
toss the cooked potatoes until they’re browned on the outside. Then there’s garlic potato salad. A traditional
staple of Spanish tapas bars, I first had garlic potato salad at Café Ba-Ba-Reeba
in Chicago. Tapas are small dishes that began when the proprietors of Spanish bars would give
their patrons slices of bread to put on top (tapa) of their glasses to keep the flies away. Eventually they
began to offer toppings for the bread to attract customers (presumably by
that time they’d found other ways to control the flies!). The
original bar snacks, tapas evolved into an entire subset of Spanish cuisine. Although some
are still served on slices of bread, the genre has expanded to encompass an
incredibly varied range of dishes. Café Ba-Ba-Reeba, which opened in
1985, was the first tapas restaurant in the Midwest and is still going strong. The garlic potato salad was one of the best things we
had. I wanted to make it myself as soon as I tasted it, but, simple as the
dish seemed, I couldn’t get it quite right. Soon after, I discovered
that David Radwine, manager of the Sangamo Club, had also been trying to
make it, with the same lack of success. Comparing notes, we made sporadic
attempts to reproduce it over the next few years. We tried sour cream,
yogurt, and different kinds of homemade mayonnaise and combinations
thereof, to no avail. Finally Emilio Gervilla came to Springfield as guest
chef for the annual Hope School Benefit. The original chef at Café
Ba-Ba-Reeba, Gervilla had since gone on to open several successful tapas restaurants on his
own in Chicago and the suburbs. As my husband and I walked into the benefit, David
came up to us: “You’ll never guess the dressing for the potato
salad!” He was right. I never would have guessed — it was just
Hellman’s mayonnaise! Emilio’s garlic potato salad is wonderful with
ordinary boiling potatoes and regular garlic, but making it with new
potatoes and fresh first-of-the-season garlic transforms it into something
sublime.
Garlic potato salad
Ingredients 1 pound waxy boiling potatoes, preferably new
potatoes 3/4 cup Hellman’s mayonnaise, plus more if
needed 1 tablespoon garlic, mashed to a fine paste with 1/2
teaspoon kosher or sea salt Freshly ground pepper to taste 1/4 cup minced parsley, preferably flat-leafed,
divided
Instructions Boil or steam the potatoes (steaming preferred) just
until tender. If you are boiling them, cut them into bite-size pieces after
cooking; if steaming them, cut them into bite-size pieces before steaming.
Let cool completely at least to room temperature or refrigerate before
proceeding. Mix the mayonnaise, garlic, pepper, and half of the
parsley in a bowl. Add the potatoes and gently mix until all ingredients
are thoroughly combined. Check the seasoning. Serve chilled or at room
temperature, sprinkled with the remaining parsley.
This article appears in Jun 22-28, 2006.
