Close your eyes for a moment and envision Vincent Van Gogh’s painting The Potato Eaters. In a dark room, a family huddles around a table wearing heavy coats, wrapped in shawls, their gnarled fingers tightly gripping forks, sharing a scant meal of potatoes. A single oil lamp lights the entire room, perhaps their only source of heat as well. For this little family, potatoes stand alone between life and death, light and darkness, cold and warmth.
Food is often the central metaphor in art—the sensuous grapes of Caravaggio, Vermeer’s bread and milk, Cezanne’s pears—metaphors for hunger, sensuality, abundance, and life. Writers, too, obsess about food. Miguel de Cervantes talks about food in nearly every chapter of Don Quixote, and Charles Dickens in A Christmas Carol and in Oliver uses food as a symbol both of poverty and love. Who can forget the romantic picnic of wine, chocolate, and bread in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love? I think about it every time I pour a glass of Mad Housewife Merlot.
We use food as metaphor in our speech everyday. You might call me a sweetie pie or a cutie pie, I’ll accept either. Your tax accountant who just saved you hundred of dollars is the crème de la crème, your last minute babysitter is full of the milk of human kindness. Depending on how your Valentine’s Day went, your complexion might be peachy, pasty-faced, or whey-faced. You may be salt-and-pepper or a carrot top, you and your best friend are two peas in a pod, your dad, the salt of the earth. You go bananas from time to time, just as we all know someone who is nuts or nutty as a fruit cake. Your husband is a couch potato, and vegs out all weekend when he isn’t working at his plum job, bringing home the bacon, while you work your knuckles to the bone for peanuts.
If life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. If you are in the soup, try not to get in a pickle. Wake up and smell the coffee. Life isn’t a bowl full of cherries. It might not be your cup of tea, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles. It’s not such a tough nut to crack. And don’t let anyone tell you it doesn’t mount to a hill of beans. That’s baloney. Life is a piece of cake.
Food doesn’t merely feed us, but informs the way we see the world. If we take the time to experience food, to handle real food, we have a language rich with meaning. If you’ve never made an omelet, what does it mean to you if someone says to make an omelet you first have to break some eggs?
Americans eat millions of French fries every year, but do they ever stop to think about the lowly potato? The potato that sustained life when there was nothing else? Do they think about “The Potato Eaters”?
Before you prepare dinner tonight, pour yourself a glass of Mad Housewife Chardonnay and contemplate the potato. Rub off the dirt. Wash it. Peal it. Feel its weight, notice how it cries a little when you squeeze it, milky tears, how slippery it is, how a raw slice snaps, how awful it tastes, gritty and bitter. If it’s been sitting around awhile, it may have scary little claws coming out of it. But when cooked, the potato can be a luscious soup, a crispy deep fried morsel, a dumpling, a pancake, or a mound of creamy, buttery heaven. It transcends.
And next time someone calls you a potato head, you’ll know what they’re talking about.
Potato and Leek Soup with Scallops
Simple, elegant, and delicious, this soup is perfect on a cold winter’s night. The scallops aren’t necessary, but add a delightful texture and subtle flavor. Serve with crusty bread and Mad Housewife Chardonnay.
4 cups potatoes, peeled and diced in large chunks
2 leeks
2 quarts chicken stock (preferably homemade)
½ cup Mad Housewife Chardonnay
¼ cup parsley
1 cup bay scallops (thawed, or fresh)
½ cup milk (or half and half)
1 tablespoon butter
pinch of nutmeg
salt and black pepper
1. Sauté leeks in 1 tablespoon of butter until soft. Add one cup of chicken stock to cool the leeks. Pour into a blender and blend until smooth.
2. While leeks are cooking, steam the potatoes for ten minutes in a 4 quart sauce pan. Take off heat, drain, and mash.
3. Return potatoes to the burner. Add the leek liquid from the blender, the rest of the chicken stock, and the Mad Housewife Chardonnay. Cook for a few minutes. Add milk and scallops. Cook for 3 minutes.
4. Season with nutmeg, pepper, and salt (do not salt if stock was salted). Pour into bowls. Add a dollop of butter, and garnish with parsley.
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