Got a good potato dish I can only cook in France—a Robuchon recipe requiring rattes, little burlap-colored fingerlings. Nice nutty flavor, the spuds. Cook up fluffy and smooth. An American farmer will say it’s bullshit, but I think rattes grown Stateside suck. It’s the terroir, I’m sure of it. Something about the soil and sun and air in an exact location. The water. The climate. Jesus, the position of the moon. Frenchies will go on and on about terroir to anyone who’ll listen, but I think on it they’re right. Wines. Cheeses. Spirits. Big-ass chicken birds from Bresse. All the agriculture. My dish is for special occasions only. Birthdays. Anniversaries. Anniversaires. Such a pain in the ass, the cooking. You have to boil the potatoes first, then remove the skins (can’t do it with a peeler before). Once they cool and desiccate, you move them through a food mill—and it has to be a food mill and nothing else. You mush ’em with a fork or a potato ricer and you’re eating glue. They’ll get all gummy and gross. Has to be a food mill. And if you don’t give the cook a heart attack with all the hand-cranking he has to do on his shitty brocante moulinette, the amount of butter and cream he’ll marry with the milled potato fluff will induce a heart attack in you. So once a year at most. Rattes grow best near Lyon, center of French gastronomy, in and around the departments of Rhône, Loire, Ardèche, Haute-Loire. Look at the palm of your left hand. Curl your fingers above your wisdom line—imagine it’s a river; imagine it’s the Loire. Gentle. Not a fist. The point in your flesh where your pinky presses? That’s Lyon.
Big Hark is a writer from Chicago. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Plague Circus Press, Citywide Lunch, BULL, JAKE, Expat Press, and other places.
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