JUNE 2020 83
ON PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND LAST SUMMER, farmer Peter Roberts
rolled up the door on a 200-by-80-foot storage shed, and out
wafted an incomparable aroma: sweet cream and fresh-dug
soil. It was the perfume of 4.5 million pounds of russet pota-
toes. Amassed into a towering tan hillock, the tubers awaited
shipment to processors to be transformed into french fries and
hash browns by the billions.
“My grandfather started the farm in the 1950s. Then my father
took it over,” said Roberts, palming a russet the size of his hand.
“I went to school, but I wasn’t studious. I knew what I was going
to do. I like it. You’re out in the fresh air.”
It takes hard work and humility. “The day before you plant,
you pick rocks,” Roberts told me, explaining why his kids won’t
be following him in the family business. “One daughter came
home and just said, ‘Dad, I quit. I’m not picking rocks anymore.’
When you’re in high school, potato farming is not cool.”
But there’s beauty to it—especially on Prince Edward Island,
as bucolic a place as there is on this planet. Here, lush green
farmlands roll into forests bounded by ocean and crisscrossed
by streams. Holsteins laze in seaside meadows near shacks
garlanded in multicolored buoys. And in summer, pink and
purple and white blossoms with yellow centers bloom on dark,
leafy plants that thrive in the iron-red soil. They are the flowers
that signal the growth of one of the most important foods on
Canada’s “Food Island”: potatoes, the most prized ones dug just
as they start to form in midsummer.
That’s why I was on PEI. You see, I’m a bit of a potato obses-
sive. I come from a family in which my respective grandmothers’
best-cooked dishes were latkes and potato pierogies. As a jour-
nalist, I’ve traveled to the Andes to visit growers in the tuber’s
birthplace, and I’ve interviewed potato geneticists in the States.
But I had never eaten the fresh crop at first blush right from the
ground, when the little round newbies taste astonishingly milky.
In North America, Canada’s smallest province is the place to
experience that flavor. Warm summers, chilly winters, and the
right amount of rain help the tubers soak up the soil’s mineralKatelyn Visser, daughter of farmer Randy
Visser, surveys blooming potato plants at the family
farm in Orwell Cove, Prince Edward Island.goodness, and the island’s isolation keeps disease pressure
down. Potatoes grow so well here that an island you can drive
across in three hours supplies a third of Canada’s crop—in 150
varieties. Sixty percent of the harvest goes to processors; the rest
are table and seed potatoes. PEI is the world’s second-biggest
exporter of the starter spuds from whose eyes new plants sprout.
Since the 1700s, when European settlers first brought the tubers
(a reverse migration for the New World export), they’ve been
part of PEI’s identity. It seems like every islander is related to a
potato farmer; many tell stories like Roberts’ of a childhood job
walking behind a harvester to glean stray tubers left in the fields.
After work, there’s supper. Though vacationing mainlanders
might crave seafood, there’s nothing that goes with summer’s
lobster as well as a bowl of steamed ivory creamers dressed in
melted butter and parsley or crowned with sour cream. And
when the tourists leave in September, potatoes stay on the table.
Mashed, fried, or scalloped; chopped into salads; or simmered
in soups, potatoes anchor the meals on this island. They root
the plates to the earth.
That’s why Taylore Darnel calls the class she walked me
through “The Ubiquitous Potato.” Darnel was then the execu-
tive chef at The Table, a culinary studio in a converted clapboard
church about 15 minutes from Roberts’ farm. There, she taught
visiting gastronomes how to cook the local bounty: a multi-
colored potato strata layered with russets, red skins, Yukon
Golds, and inky little blues; potato and pickled beet salad; potato
bread enriched with black garlic; nut-rolled chocolate truffles,
dense and moist with the addition of mashed potatoes. “You
can’t not have a potato class on Prince Edward Island,” said
Darnel. “Wherever you look there’s potato fields.”
From the northern beaches on the Gulf of Saint Lawrence to
the southern coast facing Nova Scotia, from Bay Fortune on the
eastern shore to O’Leary in the west, I traversed those fields in
search of restaurants serving up PEI’s potatoey deliciousness.
The Blue Mussel Cafe in the fishing village of North Rustico was
packed full of diners devouring pan-seared halibut sided by
roasted russet wedges; baby reds doused in garlic, rosemary, and
local butter; or, most intriguing, mashed potatoes spiked with
green apple, the fruit adding a sweet-sour tang to the spuds.
At Richard’s Fresh Seafood beside the Covehead Harbour
Lighthouse, children licked salt from fingers dunked into bags
full of hand-cut fries—crisp on the outside, fluffy within—that
came with their parents’ hefty lobster BLTs, the crustacean’s
rich meat dressed in tarragon mayonnaise. On a rocky spit of
beach in the Northumberland Strait, Point Prim Chowder House
ladled out their stockpot namesake, smoky with finnan haddie
and chock-full of local clams and new potatoes.
In the capital of Charlottetown, I visited a floating food court
in the harbor, where staff at The Chip Shack piled gravy and
cheese curds, plus ground beef and peas, on PEI’s improve-
ment on poutine: “FWTW,” fries with the works. Nimrods’O N A
F I N E
J U L Y
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