One Potato, Two Potato

The book also "discovers" sweet potatoes, offering recipes for this oft-neglected treat that not only include stellar versions of standbys like Baked Sweet Potatoes with Marshmallows, but also Orange Semifreddo and a luscious chocolate sauce. Readers will also find formulas for such international specialties as Samosas Filled with Potatoes and Peas; Columbian Potato and Chicken Stew; and Surbiic, delicate French potato croquettes. With a detailed, up-to-date investigation of available potato types (sensibly approached in terms of starch content) and with color photos throughout, One Potato Two Potato is a definitive exploration of one of nature's most humble yet most delicious foods. --Arthur Boehm

Product Description
Everyone loves potatoes. This book transports cooks beyond the usual side dishes and introduces them to the secrets and specialties of great chefs and cooks the world over. Finamore shows how to prepare spectacularly simple appetizers, including dips, chips, and showstopping cocktail potatoes made from a few ordinary ingredients.
He presents dozens of soups and salads, including rich Summer Vichyssoise and Herb Garden Potato Salad. There are more than fifty main-dish possibilities, such as Sunday Lamb with Proper Roast Potatoes and Chicken Stuffed with Potatoes and Shiitake Mushrooms â not to mention a sophisticated rendition of Shepherd's Pie. The potato turns up as the hidden ingredient in such breads as Potato Cheddar Bread with Chives and in such desserts as moist Farmhouse Chocolate Cake.
Finamore shows how to master crisp steak fries, silky mashes,
and sumptuous gratins. A bonus feature of the book is the sweet potato,
in dishes from a delightfully nostalgic Baked Sweet Potatoes with Marshmallow to an urbane Semifreddo with Chocolate Sauce.

It is not entirely true that the book deals exclusively with recipes containing potatoes, as it also contains recipes for sauces, dips, and fillings for potatoes. One way or another, every recipe supports a course with a potato dish.

The book is divided up into chapters which suit it's star player and the list of chapter titles shows just how versatile our little spud can be. The chapters are:

Appetizers and First Courses with roasted and dressed potato skins with appropriate fillings, dips, spreads, and sauces. It also includes the famous Spanish tapas called tortillas plus potato stuffed pastries such as knishes, samosas, and pierogies.

Soups with all the usual potato and leek soups and recipes for various stocks. It also contains several chowders and potato soups with other root vegetables.

Salads include just about every kind of potato salad you can dream of. As one of my favorite types of spud dishes, salads are one of the things potatoes do well which simply can't be matched by it's starchy competitor, rice.

Main Dishes includes potatoes joined up with some form of protein. Some dishes are famous such as corned beef hash and shepherd's pie and gnocchi. Some dishes are obscure, but no less interesting.

Mashed Potatoes contains 29 recipes for mashed white and sweet potatoes, but other chapters include additional recipes for mashed potatoes such as Colcannon, which is listed under baked and roasted recipes.

Fried Potatoes gives another host of recipes, which cannot be matched by rice. All the favorites such as French Fries, Home Fries, Hash Browns, Potato Pancakes, and potato chips are here.

Baked and Roasted Potatoes contains all the usual classics for both white and sweet potatoes, including oven fries, pommes Anna, candied sweet potatoes, and roasted potatoes with other root vegetables.

Gratins and Scalloped Potatoes is another of my favorite spud styles. This is one of the few corners of the book where I find a recipe missing. There is nothing similar to the Sicilian potato gratin made with chicken stock and olive oil rather than with cream.

Boiled Potatoes includes a lot of sauces to `kick up' the bland boiled spuds and includes German Potato Dumplings.

Breads and Rolls includes the famous use of potato in foccacia plus all sorts of breads where the gluten free potato starch makes the breads more tender.

Desserts is a rather short chapter wherein potatoes are primarily used as a starch addition to pastry doughs.

As suggested by some of the contents above, the book covers both white and sweet `potatoes' even though the two plants are not closely related biologically. They are closely related in their culinary applications, since you can do to a sweet potato almost everything you can do to a russet.

It should be no surprise that the book deals with the three main types of potatoes in great detail and is very careful to specify which type of potato is best with each dish.

The chatter in the headnotes and introductory sections to each chapter are engagingly written. They are informative without being cluttered with gushing emotions about beautiful vegetables. These are spuds after all. One of my favorite sidebar sections discusses the `Art and Craft of Tourner', a nearly forgotten technique which rounds the `sharp' edges and corners of sliced potatoes to create shapes which will cook more evenly. Burning the edges of potatoes just once when you roast sliced potatoes is enough to convince you that this synonym for tedium may just have a point.

The photographs are few, but of very good quality. As I would expect from a house like Houghton Mifflen, the simple, straightforward layout and fonts are very easy on the eyes.

This is not a classic and will probably go out of print in five years, which is all the more reason to get your copy now. A worthy addition to the library of anyone who cooks often and needs good sources of variety in inexpensive ingredients. Good recipes which are cheap. That's a winner.


Don't Bother   December 4, 2002
0 out of 22 found this review helpful

Way too blah...don't bother - better tater books out there.


Okay but could be allot better   October 4, 2002
Georgina (san francisco, ca)
6 out of 19 found this review helpful

There were allot of typical potato recipes in here; pancakes, mashed etc. but many ethnic ones were not. I think you could do allot better just getting Fannie Farmet and reading her potato section than wasting your money on this.

Few pictures round this out and the pages are potatoey coloured.
Rather uninspired book.