Name a dish that isn’t improved, or unaffected, by the addition of a small potato? For this question to make sense, a bit of context would probably be useful. It started years ago, with thick soups and minestre, which my partner believes should always, always include a small potato. His reasons are two. Potatoes are wonderful! And they collapse as they cook, adding a starchy softness that thickens the soup Now, I agree with him wholeheartedly. However, I sometimes forget this important addition when making pasta and lentils or chickpea soup, meaning we now have a running (not very funny) joke that, when I do forget, we taste and invariably agree that it would have been better with the damned potato.
The damned potato became even more significant when testing recipes for my pasta book. There are several recipes – pasta with pesto alla genovese, pasta with walnut sauce, pasta with mussels (to name just a few) – that call for a potato to be cooked in with the pasta. As in a soup, the potato collapses (a bit or a lot, depending on the variety) and, as a consequence, gives out starch. Now, you’d be correct in thinking that, when it comes to cooking pasta, starch is hardly in short supply; masses of it seeps from the pasta as it cooks, as evidenced by the increasingly cloudywater. But add potato starch to pasta starch, even a small amount, and when you toss the pasta with the sauce and a ladle of the starchy pasta cooking water, things do come together even better.
