Jacket potatoes - a humbling story

Spuds you still like?

Source: Vicky Wasik

When did you last eat a jacket or baked potato for supper? Only on Monday evening in my case. Before then, honestly, it’s probably been years.

Mrs H and I are not big fans of the kitchen. Love food, don’t love the preparation. Plus, vegetarian cooking can take more effort than you think if you want to avoid regular repeats of easy favourites like macaroni and cauliflower cheese. Anything with cheese usually tastes pretty good in my view. It’s why we subscribe to Riverford’s organic recipe boxes. Step-by-step instructions, exact quantities of everything needed, so no waste and lots of variety.

Riverford Organic Farmers

Tonight, we’ve selected Leek, Lemon, Broad Bean & Crème Fraîche Linguine one of the quicker options from our five boxes this week. Normally this might have been eaten at the start of the week, but our jacket spud stole the show. And while a cheesy jacket, even one dressed up a bit might be a regular student favourite, Riverfood would struggle to justify their prices for such a simple winner.

The biggest surprise this week apart from reuniting my appreciation for a potato was Mother’s Day. I unexpectedly found myself home alone shouting at the TV when Liverpool’s claim for a penalty was denied at the death. It was a fantastic game, full of incident and amazing football against the title favourites, Manchester City.

I’d been expecting to dine with Mrs H en famille in Guildford, but two of her Amazon parcels fell due for delivery on the big day. It was the least I could do.

With no food to speak of, (recipe boxes not due until Monday) Mrs H foraged for something from the chiller cabinet while out and about, so I wouldn’t starve.

This reads so much worse than it felt at the time. I’m clearly a lazy old man who needs to sort himself out.

Adding a tin of Carlin peas, a little known British marbled substitute for chickpeas to my Sunday feast meant plentiful leftovers were fridged later with Mrs H. already seeding the idea of a big fat jacket potato, smothered with butter and cheese, crowned with those remains.

I was quite excited the next evening and wasn’t to be disappointed. It tasted delicious. Apart from wondering why I didn’t enjoy a jacket spud more often, I was reminded that this meal or something similar had once been an old diet trick.

The idea was to starve most of the day looking forward to a rewarding supper. It may have meant a mere smidgeon of butter rather than generous knife fulls but this could be overlooked when the ratatouille, a low calorie filler, was piled on top, providing some tomatoey gravy to soften the blow. It looked like a lot of food and stole away thoughts of hunger and missing out on more calorific alternatives.

Dietary habits moved on after this popular cheat. Ten years later, maybe longer, a veneer of science appeared with glycaemic indices frowning significantly on the consumption of the humble jacket potato. It turned out that jackets are packed with twice as much sugar as a can of coke. It was nearly as satanical as the evil chip, which had always been disregarded as a food choice if you were serious about losing weight. Diets that did allow them as a treat were keen to point out that you should never eat more than half a dozen and only when you’d achieved some amazing goal. Air fryers hadn’t been invented yet.

I don’t understand why jacket potatoes were never on the menu at my junior school in Oxton which I attended in the early 1970s? Chips were served once a week, probably on Friday. The rest of the week, the potato staple, never rice or pasta, was either boiled or worst of all mashed. After much complaining from me, Mum explained that they blended margarine and water with the spud, rather than butter and milk to save money. It was also a melange which didn’t remove those grey hard lumps which often contained black solid eyes which hadn’t been removed during the prep. I’ve avoided mashed potatoes whenever possible ever since.

One exciting development in Oxton village, when I was still in shorts was the opening of a baked potato shop. Was it called The Baked Potato? It was certainly a takeaway and my sister and I were keen to try it. Not that we knew, but it must have been around the same time Spud U Like (a baked potato chain) opened their first restaurant in Edinburgh in 1974.

The basic offering in Oxton was a spud with butter cooked in a fancy stove enamelled black oven at the back of the shop. The sweet smell was intoxicating. All the fillings were displayed behind the glass counter, including the usual favourites of grated cheddar cheese, baked beans, coleslaw, and even prawn cocktail for the more adventurous and deeper of pocket.

One evening while playing with the Breakalls at number five, Mr Breakall came out and gave Anne, the eldest, John had left to fix bicycles somewhere in mid-Wales, a pound note to buy their tea from the new takeaway. My sister and I were gob-smacked and jealous as hell. We shouldn’t have been really. Their mum was nearly always depressed and spent hours staring out of an upstairs bedroom window between a split in the curtains. She didn’t think we could see her, but the Breakalls sometimes pointed her out while we played.

We managed to drag our mother into the potato shop once. Being a maths teacher and the manager of our household budget, everything and I mean everything was recorded in her A4 red, graph paper book, one page per month. It took her no time to work out that she could feed the whole family and some with baked potatoes for the same price as one of theirs with a small lick of butter. She also had no problem walking straight out again, we sheepishly following in her wake, the nice man behind the counter wondering what he’d done wrong.

At first, the shop did quite well, especially at lunchtime. As the months dragged on, I’d update the family, still waiting for an opportunity to sample this far superior product. Cycling past in the early evening when they ought to be busy, the same man was still in the shop, but now he was mostly alone.

It wasn’t long after, that the for rent sign went up and the shop was gone. It is hardly surprising if most households applied the same logic as my mum. Even if people could afford it, why waste money on something which could be stuck in your own oven for an hour or less with little to no effort? Students might be lazy, but they’re not daft.

James Martin’s gourmet take on the baked potato

It took a lot longer but Spud U Like suffered a similar fate in 2019. Albert Bartlett (potato grower) with a vested interest, acquired a number of the thirty-seven stores. Since then, the TV chef, James Martin teamed up with the owners to launch an updated menu in 2021. If you want to sample any of the culinary delights, you’ll need to be in Manchester, Leeds or Plymouth, perhaps a reflection that a hot dog is still best served in a bun.