Comfort me with potatoes

“It is easy to think of potatoes,” wrote M.F.K. Fisher, “and fortunately for men who have not much money it is easy to think of them with a certain safety.”

Indeed. A potato looks and smells like a double handful of dirt, and is almost as cheap. Lately, I am too busy to shop often, and too aware of my checkbook's bottom line to shop as expansively as I would like when I do hit the grocery store. Kitchen thrift makes me feel pinched and mean. Happily for me, when I have cooked and eaten my way to a bare refrigerator, there are usually one or two Idahos still rolling around the recesses of the vegetable bin.

There are few things that I love more than a baked potato. They have a sturdy, secure heft in the hand, like a hot stone. Under a fat pat of butter and a little salt, a baked potato tastes of simple, subtle contrasts: the muddy flavor of the rough, dusky skin against the steaming, yielding white flesh underneath.

In English, potatoes in their skins are “in their jackets.” In Italian, they are in veste da camera — ‘in their nightshirts.’ If potatoes are cooked out of their jackets, many of their vitamins and vegetables leave them. (If potatoes are not cooked at all, we cannot digest their starch.) I love the autumnal crackle of baked potato skin between my molars, and a warm jacketed potato is as instinctively comforting to me as a warm bed in winter.

When I bake potatoes, I puncture each potato’s protuberant jacketed flanks with the tines of fork so that it does not explode. (This may be superstitious — I am not sure. A scene in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Farm Boy — where want of ventilation sends steaming spuds rocketing from a campfire — made me a religious piercer of potatoes at an early age.)

Letting them bake at 350F for 1 hour warms the kitchen. The smell of hot starch is primordially soothing; it sits in the hot air like the aroma of bread baking at a distance . When the potatoes are done, I split them cross-wise with a knife, push the long ends of the potato towards each other to make an origami opening, smear in a finger of butter and a pinch of salt, and eat. And while the meal is plain, it is very, very good.

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• The United Nations has designated 2008 International Year of the Potato. (Potatoes: For the truly hungry)
• Historic Potato recipes