Goes with Hamburger Helper.
Instant mashed potatoes are a common lazy meal or a "I forgot to eat now I find existence infuriating for some mysterious reason" meal. I find them quite satisfying. They are nutritionally complete enough, filling enough, and easy enough to fill a solid niche in my food repertoire. And an easy vehicle for four of the satisfaction food groups: salt, butter, cheese, and carbs.
Vichyssoise is not French food. it's a dish made by a French chef who worked in New York. ask any French and they would have no idea what a Vichyssoise is.
Neither would most Americans!
It's nice to know both cultures are equally provincial in this regard. :)
That aside, I'm guessing the author's aversion as a child is strictly texture based which is fair. Don't get me wrong, fresh prepared is better, but instant potatoes, especially the Idahoan brand, taste exactly the same to me. It's just that they're too perfectly thin and uniform, quite unnaturally so.
It's an incredible novel, and I have read it periodically since I was a teen, with so many great musings on the meaning of life but I always remember the passage on potatoes. Couldn't for the life of me tell you why that's stuck in my head so much.
EDIT
What was that about potatoes? Were they just a thing from foreign parts, like coffee; a luxury, an extra? Oh, the potato is a lordly fruit; drought or downpour, it grows and grows all the same. It laughs at the weather, and will stand anything; only deal kindly with it, and it yields fifteen-fold again. Not the blood of a grape, but the flesh of a chestnut, to be boiled or roasted, used in every way. A man may lack corn to make bread, but give him potatoes and he will not starve. Roast them in the embers, and there is supper; boil them in water, and there's a breakfast ready. As for meat, it's little is needed beside. Potatoes can be served with what you please; a dish of milk, a herring, is enough. The rich eat them with butter; poor folk manage with a tiny pinch of salt. Isak could make a feast of them on Sundays, with a mess of cream from Goldenhorns' milk. Poor despised potato — a blessed thing!
Wonderful
Thanks!
> I read once that humans can live on a diet of potatoes and milk
Protein is not a monolith; it's nine different compounds that are needed, for humans. Meat has all of them. But most plant foods do not. A person will eventually starve from lysine deficiency if they eat nothing but wheat, rice, millet, most grains really. Even though these are rich in protein. That might be why bread and rice is so often paired with beans; beans are rich in lysine and the combination covers all the bases.
One of the proteins that the potato lacks relatively is methionine; a large active adult man needs perhaps 1 - 2 gram of methionine per day. Potatoes have about 500 mg methionine per kg. That works out to some 2 - 4 kg of potatoes a day and some 1500 - 3000 calories to go with it. (Plausible enough, if you ask me. When I was younger and worked a labour job burning lots of energy I would cook a 2 kg bag of potatoes and they'd be gone in a couple days.) It does seem nothing but boiled potatoes, salt and maybe a multi-vitamin and some fat, will keep a person going more or less indefinitely. I can't do the mostly-potato diet myself anymore though. I would get very fat.
Ireland was exporting food throughout the famine, enough to have fed all of its people. The story there is one of economics and hands-off capitalism as much or more than it is about crop failure.
As I recall, Britain arranged the Acts of Union so they could exploit Ireland as a cheap source of food, labor, and soldiers. The success of the Napoleonic Wars encouraged them to accelerate production by any means necessary. They may not have intended for Ireland to become a food monoculture, or anticipated its failure by 1840, but they certainly did little to remedy the situation their imperialism brought about.
That’s why they not-so-subtly start calling them IMPs when they introduce the “abstracted version.”
It’s not merely an example. It’s the thesis of the article.
EDIT: Out of perversity, I skimmed the comments. The audience of Astral Codex Ten seems to share this interpretation, for whatever that’s worth.
Yuck; you're supposed to use milk, and butter.
> Hannah Glasse’s procedure published in 1747 in The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy is, minus the long s’s, still just about how I make them today:[with real potatoes, milk and butter]:
Exactly.
My Dad loves instant mashed potatoes. I think they taste awful. A long history of potato consumption. People like potatoes, particularly mashed potatoes. Thus there is money to be made out of selling them as a product, allowing people to skip the peeling, boiling, and mashing. People still buy the product even though it is objectively bad and not even proper mashed potato. This phenomenon seems ubiquitous. Maybe industrial capitalism itself is bad.
Generate more handy summaries like this with Instant Mashed Prose - just 0.000001 BTC per serving!I don't believe potatoes have any gluten.
The core idea of modernity's tendency to take a Good Thing and chop it up into tiny pieces and bind it into Something Resembling Good Thing[1] hit me hard. I've long felt a discomfort with things that pretend to be other things[2]; just be the thing that you are! There's something particularly macabre about the fake version of the thing being built from the ground up bones of the actual thing.
Also: the Incas invented a natural freeze drying method‽ Totally tracks that would lead to a big military advantage before there were many effective ways to preserve food. But also like, what? It took ~500 years for us to rediscover that.
1. examples from the article: McNuggets, American cheese, instant coffee, deli ham, Pringles, particle board, sheetrock, video compilations, gig economy jobs
2. like fake window shutters on houses, brick siding that's meant to look like the house is made of brick, artificial food dyes, the fiberglass shell on the outside of cars, things painted look like they're a different color.
I first tried instant mashed potatoes about five years ago.
Before then, I never even knew there was such a thing!
I don't think I can tell them apart from fresh mashed potatoes.
The ones that I have tried are plain (no onion flavoring, etc), mixed with salted butter and coffee cream.
How are people who hate the instant variety preparing them? I am curious if I simply have bad taste, or if it's some other factor.
It's so easy to make real mashed potatoes that I think there's really no point in using instant.
1: http://www.critical-theory.com/understanding-jean-baudrillar...
Is it about pulverizing software artifacts into token statistics?
What remains is not "code", but code-shaped matter?
justsomehnguy•1mo ago
ameliaquining•1mo ago
justsomehnguy•1mo ago