This is a piece from our sold out potato issue by one of our favourite writers, Caroline O'Donoghue. If you liked this and don’t want to miss out on an issue ever again, subscribe now!

A Sunday carvery with my then-boyfriend’s parents. It is the first time I am meeting them, and like all new girlfriends, I am bringing a slight cocaine energy to proceedings. Of all the meals you can eavesdrop on in a slightly-too-expensive restaurant, new girlfriend energy is the most obvious, as well as the most potent. Talking too fast, trying to get the mother to think you’re Kate Middleton and the father to think you’re Marilyn Monroe, it’s wanting your boyfriend to see you can thrive anywhere, like a succulent. The roast potatoes come. 

‘Can we get some butter?’ I ask the waiter. 

‘Butter?’ the waiter says. 

‘Butter?’ my boyfriend’s mother stresses.
‘For what?’ 

I point, with my knife, at the spuds.
‘For the potatoes.’ 

A pause. His mother again. ‘But they’re
cooked in goose fat.’ 

I was 22 and had the metabolism of a hummingbird. The idea that I was smothering fat on something that was cooked in fat had never occurred to me. It was simply how we always ate roast potatoes at home. Butter, slightly cold from the fridge, melting on a warm roastie that has just been split in two. Pools of yellow filling the tiny craters of the floury insides, like an oil spill on an alien planet. 

‘She’s Irish,’ my boyfriend finally said,
and everyone laughed. That, it seemed,
explained everything. 

I have been living in London for three years and I do not know how to cook for myself. My meals are either toast or pasta with something. I am on my way to my best friend’s house. She is, as luck would have it, a cook, and therefore singularly responsible for the nutrition of our entire friend group. In five years, she will release a best-selling cookbook, but now she is just adventurous. 

We eat risotto in squid ink, pigeon breasts cooked in red wine and served in warm baguettes, spaghetti with clams. Fresh challah even though no one is Jewish. She is 21 years old. You will eat the best meal of your life in her house but you
will not eat it until midnight. This is usually fine and gives us all more time to drink and eat crisps, but not today. 

I am single again, and in love with someone who doesn’t yet love me, and I am miserable. I need cladding. I need something so thick that it feels like I am being hugged from the inside. The boy I have chucked my relationship for – to absolutely no encouragement from him, I might add – is being flakey, distant, obviously freaked out by having become a homewrecker without even realising. In five years, we will have a flat and a dog but now he is just adventurous. I don’t know how to make mashed potatoes so I buy a microwavable punnet of mash and a brick of Kerrygold butter. 

‘Hi,’ I say, after kissing her hello. ‘Do you mind if I eat this, first? I’ll have dinner, too.’ 

She flits between disgust at the microwavable mash, and concern that I would willingly eat it. 

‘Sure,’ she says. ‘Only I don’t have a microwave.’ 

‘That’s fine,’ I say, and sit down to eat it at her table, cold. She looks appalled. ‘I don’t want to hear a word about the Irish and potatoes,’ I say, and continue eating. 

I am having dinner with a new friend at a chic restaurant in Shoreditch. It is one of those dinners where you have too much to say from the instant you sit down, and so you order from instinct rather than proprietary. 

‘Sorry,’ the waitress says, reading back the order. ‘I just wanted to get this right. You want the sweet potato salad, and a side of truffle chips.’ 

‘Yes.’ 

‘So you want potato with a side of potato?’ 

I blink at her. ‘Yes.’ 

***

You can’t talk about being Irish abroad without talking about potatoes; you can’t talk about potatoes without talking about the famine; you can’t talk about the famine without feeling like a joke. As a historical event, the Irish famine
is disturbing, chillingly recent, and also – unfortunately – funny. It’s not funny, of course. More than a million people starved to death. More emigrated. The population halved: from eight to just under four million. 

There is much evidence to support the belief that the failure of the potato crop in Ireland in 1845 was used by the British as a form of ethnic cleansing. Relief was sent, and then quickly curbed, lest the Irish become too dependent. Soup kitchens opened and closed depending on the prevailing mood in parliament that week. ‘I saw the dying,’ reported one London newspaper. ‘The living, and the dead, lying indiscriminately upon the same floor, without anything between them and the cold earth, save a few miserable rags upon them.’

The most painful thing about all of this, of course, is that there were plenty of other kinds of food available. Ireland was a cornucopia. But the orchards, the animals, the grain, was predominantly owned by private estates. Relief corn was shipped in from America when we had trees dripping with fruit. Before the famine, the bulk of the population was living off less than one acre, where the most convenient thing to grow was potatoes. 

And yet: it’s funny! You can’t talk about it for too long without feeling ridiculous, possibly because the word potato is so silly. ‘Potato’ is such a silly word that there was a famous 18th century racehorse called Potoooooooo (Pot with eight ‘o’s). The above information – which I have quoted pretty much verbatim to people who have asked what exactly the whole famine thing was about, anyway – is extremely hard to get through without cracking a smile. It is, I’m convinced, because you have to say the word potato so much. 

It’s funny because, despite our devastating history with potatoes, we still love them. We’re obsessed. We are the only culture on earth that will serve a lasagne with a side of baked potato. When I drive through the countryside with my parents, they will still veer off into a stranger’s driveway when they see a chalkboard reading ‘Kilo of Red Roosters – 5 Euro’ on the road outside. We have one of the highest rates of coeliac sufferers in the world, simply because we were so dependent on potatoes for so long that we find grain literally hard to digest. Our bodies reject any carb that isn’t a potato. 

It’s embarrassing to talk about, and I imagine every culture has its own version. As food writer Melissa Thompson points out in her Guardian article on fried chicken, enslaved Americans perfected fried chicken recipes as a result of chickens being the only livestock that they were permitted to keep; then, once it became a tenant of American cuisine, fried chicken was consistently used to mock and stereotype America’s Black population. 

It’s a sad inevitability of any oppressed community’s food culture: the thing that gives you the most comfort inevitably becomes the stick to beat you with, and therefore the food you resist most. Even as I learned to cook properly, I still never cooked with potatoes. 

Avoiding potatoes was not the only way in which I sought distance from Ireland. When I wrote my first novel, back in 2016, I did so
without mentioning Ireland or Irish people once. The characters were all English. I had been
living in the UK for five years at that point.
I was resisting, I think, both the idea of Ireland and the pressure of it. We Irish are good with
two things: potatoes, and words. What if I put myself out there, front and centre, as an ‘Irish writer’ and failed?

It strikes me now, in writing the above paragraph, that this is a strange thing to bring up. A resistance to potatoes. A resistance to writing like an Irish person might write. Like a spud, you don’t know quite what the words are going to look like until you start digging them up, and this is what I’ve dug up today. I have never quite admitted to myself that this is what I was trying to do. I wanted to be a writer without a nation, a blank slate, held to no standard or stereotype and taken wholly as myself. 

Inevitably, I discovered what all immigrants must eventually learn: your culture finds you, whether you like it or not. It all floats down the river of your subconscious and washes up on the bank of your personality. You start writing Irish once you realise that you have as much of a right to Ireland as James Joyce does. You start cooking potatoes when you realise you want them more than you don’t want to be associated with them. 

I am eight years into my relationship and ten years into London. I am making chips. I am not a confident cook, but these chips are my secret weapon. This is my mother’s method of making them, and she made them for us as a treat, because they are a bit of an effort for an ordinary dinner. I make them on bad Fridays, when we are too poor to go ‘Out Out’, too tired for the pub, too disillusioned with the limited field of Deliveroo options in our area.

These chips make me feel like a matriarch. They are faffy and they are dangerous,
chiefly because they involve boiling hot oil and a spaghetti pot that is probably too shallow for this task. 

Put a big pot of sunflower oil on the boil. The oil will be ready when a crust of stale bread fries instantly. Peel the potatoes. Cut the chips large, but very thin. Soak them in cold water for five minutes. Dry them in a kitchen towel. Fry them in handfuls, but don’t crowd them. Remove them after eight minutes with a slotted spoon and dump them in a bowl filled with kitchen paper. Soon you will have a pile of chips. Redo the whole thing nearer the time you need them. 

By now, your boyfriend will be home from the gym, and your house will smell like a chippy. He bounces through to the kitchen, high on the grease in the air, and kisses me. ‘I love that I know it’s going to be a good day when these chips are on,’ he says. ‘And I love that someday our kids will know it’s a good day, too.’ 

Which is rather a long way from the cold mash on my friend’s kitchen table. A long way from starvation. A long way from home, but if you have the energy to scrub the muck off, you can come back again. For a meal, at least. 

Caroline O’Donoghue is an author and podcaster living in south London.

Sarah Cliff is a Welsh illustrator who currently enjoys adjusting vector curves and cheese on toast.