It's Monday lunchtime and I'm sitting in a little cafe near where I work in the centre of Edinburgh. I've sat in this cafe several times in recent weeks all because of baked potatoes.
In an ideal world a baked potato should be cooked in the hot ashes of a fire. My earliest memories of the humble baked spud are when Grandad cooked them on a Saturday afternoon as he sat in his favourite chair to watch the horse racing on a black and white TV. The potatoes would go into the hot ashes below the coal fire in the living room and emerge a good while later cooked, possibly charred in places, with a crispy outside and a soft inside. Served with butter and salt those potatoes must have been heavenly. I never got to taste one cooked by him but I’ve cooked them that way myself.
Things have changed since those days. Horse racing on TV is in colour, open coal fires are a thing of the past in most homes, and Grandad has long since departed this earth. But what hasn't changed is the taste of a well cooked baked potato.
The modern kitchen would not be complete without a microwave oven. Mine has one. It sits in a corner of the kitchen with a couple of oversize cookery books on top of it, and it doesn't work. It hasn't worked for many months and it waits for me to find time to take it to the local refuse point for recycling. For now, keeping books clear of the work surface is as near to recycling as it gets.
Even when it worked the microwave was only used for heating milk or possibly thawing a chicken breast. What I really mean is it cooked the outside of the chicken and left the inside raw but thawed enough to cook on a hob. These days the milk is also heated on the hob in a marvelous invention called a saucepan. OK, milk pan.
The microwave did at times get pressed into service for cooking "baked" potatoes. They too would emerge with varying degrees of cooked-ness, a bit like the curate's egg: good in parts. Perhaps the curate had the same type of microwave. What it could never do was turn out a baked potato with a consistently soft inside and a crisp and tasty outside.
The closest I can get to the perfect potato, the tastiest tattie, the scrumptious spud is to cook one in the oven. But one and a half hours at 150℃ does not constitute fast food and fast food is the order of the day on a Monday lunchtime. One rule I do have is that fast must also mean healthy, so fries, that other great potato recipe, and an accompanying burger are out.
So when I discovered this little cafe, with it's purpose built baked potato oven, and ate a perfectly cooked baked spud served with delicious fillings and a tasty side salad, I started to come back for more.
The first time I visited was out of necessity. It was bitterly cold outside and not the weather to walk the streets let alone eat sandwiches alfresco. So I came to this little cafe, sat in the warmth and ate a delicious baked potato. The weather has greatly improved, but I prefer to relax here, enjoy my lunch, and then sit a while and reminisce about the humble tattie before heading back to work. Speaking of which, it’s time to go.
Many thanks to the All Good Cafe for feeding the soul and stirring the memories.
