Braise with Salt Potatoes

Three hundred pounds of new potatoes. Red Pontiac. Kennebec. Yukon Gold. 
Cold soil on sunburnt fingers. 
Nasty silt dusts us after we pick them up. 

I call it “picking up potatoes” because it makes it seem like such an easy thing to do. Someone wedges the ground at the base of the hill of potatoes with a fork, similar to a pitchfork but with shorter, wider tines. The other person, if a potato picker is lucky enough to have one, simply digs through the loose clods and picks up the potatoes.

Ronnie James from down the road, whose hand has frozen into a talon of sorts from a machinery accident that occurred when he worked on the Double-A Highway, calls those reliably abundant old white taters (Kennebecs) "Kenny Backs." After him, I call them "Kenny Bakers" because I love bluegrass music. 

My step-dad, Steve, used to plow them out, which was much faster than digging them. Poppy said that was lazy and wasteful and only a last resort. 

We took frequent breaks when we dug potatoes with Poppy. Poppy’s COPD made that an easy call. "Boys, when you do a job, you got to sit down every now and then and brag on yourself." That wasn’t Dad’s way. We poked fun at ourselves when we worked with him. Wiping the soaking, salty sweat from our brows, we would smoke dope and joke about being lazy sons of bitches.

Three hundred pounds of new potatoes. 
Cold, golden nuggets beautifully sweating in the new harshness of sunlight. 
When we’re done—really done—we will have close to a thousand pounds. 
But we ain’t picking them up all at once. 

For now, we need to get them up to the house for dinner. 

New potatoes are best when boiled, buttered, and salted well. Their natural starches are heaviest at the beginning of their storage. When fried, a new potato burns on the outside in the caramel it produces from its own sugars. The inside remains undone or underdeveloped in texture. 
There’s really only one right way to do it: boil the potatoes in generously salted water. Butter them with butter made from the season’s ramp harvest and the milk cows’ hard-earned pasture pickings.

Salt is a funny thing. There is only one grain difference between perfectly salted and over-salted. Depending on the salt you use, that could be a larger or smaller margin of error. If you’re new to salting your food, put what I would describe as “an ill-advised looking amount of salt.” Most people under-salt their food. That doesn’t mean you should over-salt it. It should be salted, not salty, even after all these years. If you make potatoes this way, and never have them by any other means, then I promise you won’t be eating too much salt. High sodium doesn’t come from home, it comes from next door. It hides around corners at supermarkets and by the side of the road on late, long drives. It secrets itself into your car in a bag you get from a drive-thru window. It seduces you on holidays like Thanksgiving – these kinds of dinners only happen once a year, so make it count. 

Eat the potatoes with a meal that is a natural fit in terms of flavor profile. German, perhaps. Homemade sauerkraut you made from store-bought cabbages because it’s cheaper and because cabbage moths are little bitches. That gives us a much-needed acidic component and supports good gut health, and since all of us get ticks all the time we’ve got alpha-gal disease and need the help maintaining a healthy gut. 
What a sick and sorry bunch we are. 
We’re lucky our wives ain't left us.

Make a braise for the main dish. If you put it in during the hottest part of the day, you can let it cook all afternoon. The longer you leave it, the better it’ll get. Cut onions, garlic, and a third aromatic of your wildest desire. Get strange with it if you want to. 

For some people, celery is suitable. Dry and salt the meat. Sear it in a deep dutch oven with butter or lard. Never use seed oils, or evil will reign down upon you in the form of excessive linoleic acid, the function of which is to poison your heart with bad thoughts and your stomach with worse. Take the browned meat out of the pan, cool the pan, and add in your vegetables to sweat. Low and slow. Twenty minutes on medium-low is good. Forty minutes on low is better. 
This is the lord’s work, behave accordingly. Deglaze the pan with beer. Water is fine if it has to be. Leave the wine for fancier folks than us potato diggers.

Now you have some time. 
Finish the beer that didn’t make it into the pan. 
Play hide and seek with your daughter. Pretend like she’s not behind the bedroom door again. Make a show of looking everywhere. Feign real worry. Call her name. Show her you mean it. When you find her, display real relief. 
Look at your wife and smile at her. Tell her you’re proud of her. She’s feeling overwhelmed by the amount of milk she’s being brought by Dad. It’s not like a nine to five. This is work that shows up at your house and demands to be done. It doesn’t ask to see your qualifications and it doesn’t give you vacation days. 
Unless you love it. Then that’s all there is. Remind yourself: This is what you wanted. You can’t buy these things in any store.

Serve the meat if it takes its clothes off when you ask it to. Serve it with the saucy base. Place a tater on a plate and plant a healthy scoop of kraut beside it. Eat. Be humble.
 
Three hundred pounds of new potatoes. Not plowed. Dug. 
Your hands, blistered on the wooden shaft of the potato fork, will have accidentally skewered and sliced a mess big enough for the first meal. 

Pat yourself on the back. Brag on yourself. Sit down and spend the evening listening to vinyl records and sipping a responsible amount of scotch and homemade ginger beer. Use the salty potato water to brine a big chicken, thus continuing the cycle. 

Carry the work of today into tomorrow and be well-fed on what you have. These are the pieces of the past you can keep for the future.