The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [23]
The French Paradox cannot be dismissed. It should have been noticed decades ago. And its contribution is to encourage researchers to discover the many other common causes of heart disease besides the saturated fat in our diets. The French Paradox is an embarrassment only to those nutritionists and physicians who had refused to recognize the obvious. We have known for some time that half of all heart attacks occur in people with average or low cholesterol, and that half of all people with high cholesterol never have heart attacks.
Totally Mashed
For some time now, I have been unhappy with my mashed potatoes. This is a pivotal difference between me and Omar Sharif, who is so pleased with his mashed potatoes that, according to the glossy magazine on my desk, he always has a second helping. His mashed potatoes really belong to Joël Robuchon, the brilliant chef-owner of the Paris restaurant Jamin, and for several years they have been the most honored mashed potatoes in the world. They are also an escapade in animal fat. Judging from the recipe in Robuchon’s Ma cuisine pour vous (Laffont, 1986), he beats a half pound of butter into each pound of boiled potatoes. In the ten minutes it takes Omar Sharif to clean his plate, he will have swallowed ten times the maximum daily dose of animal fat allowed by the U.S. surgeon general, before he gets to his main course. This is precisely why mashed potatoes and the other fashionable comfort foods have become so important to us. They let us feel chic and trendy without having to eat tuna carpaccio and fava beans. Considering the smear campaign against dietary fats being waged by the surgeon general and his ilk, mashed potatoes are a godsend.
But while Omar Sharif swans about Paris, my mashed potatoes still get gummy on me. Sometimes they go cataclysmically wrong, turning sticky and gluey or doughy and pasty, bonding to my teeth and gums and the roof of my mouth, coating my tongue and throat.
As luck would have it, the instant mashed potato industry is even more panicky about sticky potatoes than I am. An average potato, on its long journey from loamy meadow to those packets of dehydrated granules on your supermarket shelves, undergoes such intricate torture that its aptitude for gumminess is amplified many times over. Industry scientists, whose careers depend on preventing potatoes from turning out that way, publish their findings in various technical journals here and abroad, which a teacher in Atlanta named Shirley Corriher, who is writing a book on the science of cooking, showed me how to find with my personal computer. Of the 341 papers written on mashed potatoes in the past twenty years, thirty seemed especially worth reading, as did Potato Processing, the bible of the industry. The USDA did much of the early work on instant mashed potatoes, and its expert in California, Merle Weaver, was particularly helpful to me over the telephone.
What follows is a series of small suggestions for making good mashed potatoes and one big suggestion. Whether to label the latter a major breakthrough in home culinary science is for others to judge.
Let’s get acquainted with the potato. The potato is the most important vegetable in the world. Ten billion bushels are grown every year, almost half of them in Russia and Poland, where vodka is extremely popular. Mashed potatoes whipped with milk are a nearly perfect food that single-handedly nourished nineteenth-century Ireland until the potato blight struck and things turned rough. Without milk, potatoes will keep you alive for 167 days if you can stomach 3¾ pounds of them a day. The average American consumes one medium potato a day, or 110 pounds a year, as often as not in processed form—chips and other snacks, frozen French fries, and instant granules—and derives more vitamin C from potatoes than from citrus