Trekking for Tibetan potatoes

When it comes to recipes, I'm a hunter, not a gatherer.

By John Thorne

Nov 14, 2000 | My wife, Matt, and I were in a small shop called Ten Thousand Villages -- one of many such shops, staffed by volunteers and sponsored by the Mennonites -- which offers native crafts from around the world. I had ducked in a few days earlier, looking for a present for an elderly friend who's hard to buy for, and found what I hoped would be just the thing, a mobile from El Salvador strung with miniature clay cooking pots.

Matt thought it was a gas -- you just can't look at it without smiling -- and we had rummaged through the entire stock to find the one we liked the most. I was heading for the cash register, mobile dangling from one hand, when I was stopped in my tracks. Here was something I hadn't noticed at all during my last visit -- a little table with platters of bite-size snacks for customers to enjoy while they browsed: chicken satay from Indonesia, spice-coated cashews from India, corn bread from Guatemala and, last, Tibetan curried potatoes.

Now, I am the sort of person who not only has forced fancy grocery stores to put up "One Sample per Customer, Please" signs beside the cheese-tasting plate but has also revealed the signs' total futility. After all, it is nothing to walk around the store (or, if one is in a hurry, around the nearest display case) and return with a fresh expression of pleased surprise: "Catalonian aged goat cheese? How fascinating!"

Here, however, there was no intimidating signage, so I simply took root at the spot and prepared to have a second lunch. As it turns out, however, there are only so many spiced cashews, chunks of chicken satay or (especially) wedges of Guatemalan corn bread you can get down without a free beverage's being provided as well. I was reluctantly deciding enough was enough and preparing to move on when I took a little bite of the Tibetan curried potatoes for politeness' sake. In my personal lexicon, the word "curry" is all but synonymous with "acid indigestion" and, given this association, "curry" plus "potatoes" hardly inflamed my imagination.

To my astonishment, what I tasted was so compellingly good that it took every bit of my self-control to keep me from grabbing the tray and running out of the store, muttering "Mine! Mine! Mine!" Instead, I just remained where I stood, eating as many of the potatoes as I could, while Matt, who was already acting as if she had never met me, moved to the far end of the store.

On reflection, it isn't all that easy to explain what it was about the dish that seized hold of my appetite and wouldn't let go. The potatoes didn't possess what some food writers like to refer to as "big taste" -- that is, a knockout flavor that wraps its fist around the eater's tongue and makes it cry uncle.

On the contrary, they had a sort of innocence of flavor that made them completely at home among the artisanal crafts surrounding them. What these potatoes expressed was not the studied complexity of the master chef but the carefully polished minimalism of peasant cooking, where a few simple ingredients are aligned in perfect proportion to create a radiantly delicious dish.

The potatoes were tender; their coating, redolent of ginger, garlic, pepper and other spices, was neither a dusting nor a sauce but a kind of fragrant, savory integument, the sole purpose of which was to alert the mouth that something totally delectable had just arrived.

The platter emptied, I left the store in a golden haze.

Next Page: The hunt begins

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