Potatoes
One of the main problems that we faced whilst on our working holiday on a farm in France was food. Our first challenge came on the first night after our hosts had dropped us off at the cottage where we were staying. Soon after meeting the other two lads, Alex and Julian, who were living and working with us, we got hungry and asked them what there was to eat. “There’s loads to eat,” said Julian. “They feed us really well,” added Alex. This seemed like good news, but the reality was not so good. “There’s loads to eat” wasn’t altogether a lie, technically there was lots of food but it came in the shape of a huge bag of courgettes and potatoes, nothing else, no herbs, no spices, no ‘store cupboard ingredients’, but although it wasn’t going to be delicious, at least we weren’t going to go hungry. Alex and Julian weren’t very helpful in coming up with ideas of how to cook an edible meal so we decided to just slice everything up and fry it. They weren’t very helpful when it came to cutting up the food either; in fact we worked out quite soon that they weren’t very helpful at all. There was also very little in the way of cooking equipment. Alex found us a saucepan to cook everything in, but it was tiny, and the food (enough for 4 hungry adults) couldn’t all fit inside. The small size of the pan was matched by the small size of the flames from our gas hob and, if it were indeed possible to cook potatoes with this set-up, the earliest we would be eating would be breakfast time.
We searched our little kitchen for a frying-pan but there was nothing. What we did find was an enormous old metal watering can that, after a quick clean, did the job of a frying-pan perfectly well, even if it didn’t really look the part. The potatoes didn’t take too long to fry up in our make-shift pan, and although our meal was boring, we were at least fed.
We were quite proud of our frontier style innovation, but I wasn’t keen on eating the same thing every day, so I wondered what food Alex and Julian usually ate and I worked out that they must eat something other than potatoes, because whatever they ate must be something they could cook in their tiny pan but I couldn’t work out what it might have been.
“So when you have more food, what sort of things do you cook?” I asked.
“Just simple, seasonal things really, but we’ve not had any food deliveries for nearly a week, so recently we’ve mostly just been eating potatoes and courgettes,” said Julian.
“How have you been cooking the potatoes?” I asked.
“Just in that little pan,” said Alex. “Until you found that watering can, it was all we had.”
“How did you manage to cook them properly?” I asked. “It must be nearly impossible in that tiny pan.”
“Yes we think it’s impossible,” said Julian, “in fact, this is the first time that we’ve not had to eat our potatoes raw.”
Alex and Julian had been eating raw potatoes the whole time that they had been at the farm, and for the last week they had been eating raw potatoes every day. The next day we called our hosts and asked if they could lend us some pots and pans, and send us up some food. They apologised about the food, but this actually wasn’t their fault. Apparently, when Alex and Julian ran out of food, Alex was supposed to call our hosts to tell them, and then they would deliver more food the next day, but Alex hadn’t phoned, and our hosts had therefore assumed that there was enough food. Our hosts also explained that they owned another holiday cottage next door to ours that had a fully stocked kitchen and that we were welcome to use it.
Alex and Julian, it appeared, had known about this other kitchen the whole time. We found it hard to believe that anyone would eat raw potatoes if there was another option, we suspected at first that they did it because they were too lazy to go next door and cook them properly, and this wasn’t far from the truth. In fact, there was an elderly neighbour who lived between the two holiday cottages, who would often see them walked between them, and ask them to do something for her, like chop some wood or fix something or move something heavy, and, because they were lazy, Alex and Julian preferred to eat raw potatoes then help this lovely old lady with her chores.
