Cooking with Nana ….. potato pancakes

 Yesterday I made potato pancakes.

The humble potato

Now there shouldn’t be anything unusual about that.

They are after all just a mix of grated potatoes, egg, flour and flavouring which you fry up.

And to spice things further you can always add onion or apples.

Not that my German grandmother added such things.

She stuck to the simple potato, flour and eggs and cooked them to perfection.

Mother tended to be a tad heavy handed and sometimes hers departed from the thin crispy variety with an ossy centre and became bigger and heavier.

Either way they were a staple dish in our house and often came inside two slices of bread, compounding their calorific content.

Pizza

But we knew no better, and potato pancake sandwiches sat beside, apple sandwiches, sugar sandwiches, and bread with dripping and bread with meat or fish paste.

And for 63 of my 74 years, I have on and off attempted to replicate the perfect potato pancake.

Sadly, always with little success.  It never occurred to me to look up a recipe, just followed what I thought Nana and mum did it.

Had I followed a recipe I would have spotted the binding agent of the egg.

And the rest as they say is easy peezy.

They now sit beside those other favourites of home made pizza, parmigiana di melanzane, heaps of pasta dishes, and that triumph of gooey potato pleasure which mixes slices of cooked potatoes, mozzarella cheese topped with tomato sauce.

                                                Lasagna

Historically what all of them have in common is that they are peasant food, low on meat and high on cheap products easily available.

Pesto and pasta

In the case of potato pancake which can be found across middle Europe the challenge and the fun is what goes in, from onion to apple or whatever is available.

Like pasta and pizza they are easy to make,  are filling but offer up all sorts of variants.

And that is that.

Other than to say what was once simple peasant food has been transformed or as the Italian side of the family would say stolen.

That simple pesto sauce which accompanies pasta and is just a mix of fresh basil, pine nuts and cheese with lashings of olive oil is now to be found in salads, and sandwiches.

But sometimes adaptions do work, and the new kid on the block which is red pesto, made from sundried tomatoes is a favourite.

But why should I be surprised .... because the simplest peasant foods were always up to be adapted as food supplies changed. 

Pizzoccheri della Valtellina

And sometimes the oddest simple ingredients make stunning dishes.

So Tina's mum who is from Naples long ago embraced a northern Italian dish, which is Pizzoccheri della Valtellina, which put simply is a mix of pasta, potatoes, savoy cabbage and spinach and three types of cheese. Pizzoccheri is a type of short wide tagliattelle made from a mixture of buckwheat flour and wheat flour. The buckwheat gives the pasta a brown speckley look which I have to say was different.

She cooked the potatoes and cabbage together and then layered these with the cooked pasta and the diced cheese with more grated cheese on top and bakes for about 15 minutes.

I have to confess that greens do not do much for me. I guess it dates back to overcooked green cabbage which was served up in my primary school. Even now I have vivid memories of the agony of forcing it down under the stern gaze of the dinner lady wanting to be anywhere than facing this plate of torture.

But her  Pizzoccheri is very heaven.

More pizza

Our Saul has always made a heap of different pesto's depending on what "green ingredient" he can put his hands on .

Potato pancake

In the same way pizza that classic street food has evolved and on the way has been been claimed by lots of nationalities, but at home in Italy and here in Chorlton we are all agreed pineapple ain't a good topping.

Pictures, potato pancakes, pizza, and parmigiana di melanzane from the collection of Andrew Simpson