I had heard about Golden Wonder, the rock-hard potato with a deep honey-brown skin that roasts like a dream, but only came across my first a year or so back, at the farmers’ market. Hard as ice and crisp white inside, the golden one turns out to hate water and will turn to soup if you attempt to boil it. Give it olive oil, butter, or goose or duck fat instead. This is the potato for frying in little cubes with rosemary and salt, and for French fries. If you plant Golden Wonder in April, and are lavish with the water, it will reward you with charming, snow-white flowers flushed with palest lilac and, come September, perhaps the best frying potatoes of all, to be finely shredded and cooked in a flat cake with goose fat and garlic.

　　

Ingredients

enough for 4

　　Golden Wonder potatoes – 1 pound (500g)

　　goose fat – about 3 tablespoons

　　garlic cloves – 4

　　

Step 1

Peel the potatoes (the skins are tough) and grate them finely. I have done this by hand but it takes just seconds using a food processor fitted with a medium-fine grating blade. You want the strands of potato to be roughly the same thickness as the wool for knitting a sweater.

　　

Step 2

Melt the goose fat—I sometimes use butter—in a wide, shallow pan and add the grated potato. Grind over a little sea salt, then squash the garlic cloves flat and tuck them in among the strings of potato. Cook over low to medium heat for fifteen to twenty minutes, until the underside is crisp and golden. Loosen the edges with a spatula as they cook, pushing it farther under the cake until it is free enough to slide about.

　　

Step 3

Lay a heatproof plate on top of the pan, then, holding it firmly in place, turn the whole thing upside down (I find doing this with one positive movement and no dithering tends not to end in tears). Now slide the potato cake back into the pan and cook the other side.

　　

Step 4

When it is truly golden, crumble over a pinch of sea salt flakes and serve, hot and crisp, from the pan.

　　Tender