At Balthazar by Reggie Nadelson

Author:Reggie Nadelson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books

CHAPTER 13

GOD’S POTATOES

A shortage of the brown-skinned GPOD Idaho russets always gave Vinnie DeFrancesco a really vexatious case of agita. If he couldn’t get enough of this particular spud, it could lead to a shortage of the frites, the French fries for which Balthazar was rightly famous. These were always the best frites in town, maybe the country. Skinny fried potatoes, fleshy, fluffy, tasty, and dense inside; the outside, crispy and golden and brown. “We like to say GPOD stands for God’s Potatoes on Demand,” Kevin Searle, the company manager, told me. Idaho sounded a godly place.

So much were these fries rightly adored that no other potato was ever good enough for Balthazar. When Keith McNally opened Balthazar in London, he tried eight kinds of British or Euro potato, didn’t like any of them, and considered shipping the GPODs across the pond. People thought he was nuts, but then, they had probably not tasted Balthazar’s French fries.

Balthazar sold a staggering amount, frites served in piles on the steak frites, with burgers, on their own. “Without these potatoes, there are no frites, and without frites, there would be no steak frites,” Vinnie told me. “Potatoes, we always get them from the same source, they are GPOD ninety-count, grown in Idaho. The prices can vary from eighteen to thirty-five dollars per case, and when the crop is about to finish, they start becoming very expensive. We use about twelve to fifteen cases per day, depending on the day of the week.”

At one point, Vinnie, being a persuasive guy, convinced a distributor on Long Island to build a shed and stockpile the potatoes, which are harvested only once a year in Shelley, Idaho.

I’d planned to visit Shelley during the harvest, maybe dig up a couple of my own spuds. This was the best time to go, I was told, because during harvest Shelley goes into party mode. At Spud Day, there are sack races and cook-offs, and people play around with the potatoes and feast on them and dress up as spuds.

The potato’s origin in the high Andes—far, far from Idaho—was the gift of the New World to the Old and, because you could feed workers cheap on them, very popular with the bosses. Potatoes fed South American silver miners in the sixteenth century, and eventually fueled the industrial revolution. They were also the poisoned present of imperial England to Ireland; when the potato famine came, it drove the Irish—literally half of the country’s population—to the United States, Canada, and Australia.

Still, Marie Antoinette wore a headdress of potato flowers to a fancy dress ball (let them eat spuds), and a staple of Jackie Kennedy’s diet was a baked potato with crème fraîche and caviar.

French fries, as a dish, did not have a particularly glamorous origin, though; France and Belgium both claimed it. The likelihood was that it got its name from American GIs who ate them after the war in Belgium. Everybody was speaking French, of course, so the GIs referred to the food as French, and so the name.

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