CHRIS RUNDLE

DON'T WRITE THEM OFF AS DULL - CHRIS IS HERE TO TELL YOU THERE'S A POTATO FOR EVERY OCCASION...

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TIME was - and it wasn’t that long ago, I might add - when no one got excited about potatoes. Mainly because there was nothing to get excited about

Potatoes were a plain, old staple food. Lumpy, often covered generously in the soil they grew in and distinguishable one from the other merely by the season in which they appeared.

When it meant that we had new potatoes for a few precious months of the year and threatening-looking, nubbly brown tubers the rest of the time. And the way we cooked them was the way we cooked everything else - without imagination, or injecting any excitement into (or indeed expecting any excitement from) the final result.

Then came the great British food revolution which opened our eyes and broadened our minds to all the wonderful products that had been lying there just waiting to be discovered and suddenly potatoes became elevated into a whole new dimension: a category which hovered somewhere between dietary staples and the lower end of the luxury food spectrum.

Potatoes, we were told, were the trick we had all been missing, The Potato Marketing Board - or some such organisation - ran a campaign announcing that potatoes were “Britain’s buried treasure”. Which might have been a slight exaggeration, but the point was well made.