How To Boil The Proper Spud

We have a big potato thing going on here in Ireland these past hundreds of years, ever since the Spanish Armada got wrecked in a storm in the West and spilled zillions of them all over the beaches. Only for that storm the Armada might have rounded Ireland as planned, trounced the Brits, left us with no spuds and history might have been totally different. But the Spanish got wrecked, the Brits got the Empire, and we got the spud; and we haven’t looked back since, except to pen laments.

Tasty, easy to grow, on bad land or good, we came to over-depend on the spud: it was spuds for breakfast dinner and tea and you’d have a cold spud maybe while you were waiting for the fresh ones to boil. Then in the mid 1800's the spud was hit by a disease and, well, lots of ancestors starved, millions maybe, and millions of us emigrated, which was just as well, because neither London nor New York would have gotten built if we hadn’t. As the fella says, It’s an ill wind that blows no good.

Builders in the US and England discovered that Irish builders worked far better and stronger than Italian builders, who hardly worked at all on account of being namby-pamby weaklings from sucking on nothing but insipid pasta. Junk in, junk out. There’s no substance in pasta. That’s why the building trade was taken over by the Irish. We wore the Italians out long ago. When it comes to the spud versus the pasta, the spud is your only man.

Now, I’ve a confession to make. Another thing the Irish are good at, but we won’t go there. Not today anyway. As an Irish man I commit a cardinal crime against the spud almost every day: I chop it up small so it'll boil quicker. Most Irish people prefer their spuds boiled whole. They’re very particular about this and if you ask them why they’ll go all Irish gourmet, swearing by better taste and consistency and sturdier mass in the stomach for the long working days and so on. I don't really see any difference.

But I’m a bit sallow-skinned so there could be a drop of the Italian in me, causing me to under-appreciate the finer points of spud-boiling. But even given that possibility, I reckon a boiled spud mashed is a boiled spud mashed, however you may have arrived at the result. The quicker the better as far as I’m concerned. The trick is to keep your eye on the pot because if you don't they'll over-boil and that's no good, making them all slushy and tasteless.

So anyway, the brother was visiting and I was putting on the spuds and he saw me chopping them up for the quick boil and he said that's no way to prepare spuds, and I said there was no difference, and he said he had a Spanish girlfriend once who used to do them that way, and that they always ended up watery and weak and that’s why he never married her, and I said that’s not the story I heard, and that the trick to boiling spuds is watching the pot with great diligence, and the brother throws his Irish eyes to Heaven, exasperated by my foolishness, and he starts into the gourmet waffle concerning the proper preparation of the perfect spud, waxing lyrical and at length, and I forgot about the spuds boiling away in the kitchen and by the time I remembered they were over-boiled and slushy and watery and tasteless and weak and the brother gave me one of those looks that says I told ye so ye feckin’ eejit.