Of potatoes and politics

I originally picked 250 Ways of Serving Potatoes (Culinary Institute of America, edited by Ruth Berolzheimer, 1941) because this post is right before St. Patrick's Day.

As I looked through the book, though, I started to feel as if it was somehow a comment on the rhetoric of the 2016 Republican presidential candidates.

Maybe that seems like a big stretch to make for a 75-year-old booklet about potatoes, but the collection is a total sausage fest... just like some of the debates we've heard lately.

Candidates who want to minimize their opponent's size...

...might opt for suggesting the other guy's teeny-tiny pigs get lost in great big 'taters. (I'm not sure what the 'taters are supposed to represent. I think I will go the lazy/ incoherent political cartoonist route and label the potatoes "wasteful spending.")

Those who want to imply they have big... uh... links... without actually explicitly stating it might go for Pigs in Blankets:

Just make a hole in that potato and "force a link sausage" into the "cavity." (I feel kind of dirty just reading the directions!) We may not see much of that sausage, but we will sure as hell know it's all there.

For those who want to go the full Donald and put the size of their sausage right up front...

...there's the Vienna Potatoes variation of Oyster Baked Potatoes. Everyone wants to see a wiener front and center, right?

(Am I the only one who thinks that oysters in baked potatoes sounds odd too? And I can't be the only one who sees that either variation will give potatoes a much stronger erotic charge than one would expect from a starchy side dish... Those '40s housewives had to have some kind of outlet for their sexual repression.)

Happy Wednesday, everyone. Just try to get those images out of your heads! (No need to thank me. I'm sure you won't.)