Potatoes, The Art Of Skinning Just Enough

It's always a pain, isn't it, having to decide how many potatoes to skin for a meal. Especially in traditional Dutch cuisine (1), which relies heavily on mealy potatoes on an almost daily basis, the question arises if a system can be devised to figure this out. Probably you've come to the same (amateur) conclusion as me: multiply the number of people at the meal with a set number of potatoes and then add a few. This always leaves me with plenty of potatoes left over, but I can't bring myself to learn from this experience. No matter how well I
try to reduce the amount of potatoes used, at the end I invariably wind up adding a few anyway, because "you better have too much than leave someone short". Recognise this?

There just has to be a way to do it better, a mathematical rule that you can stick to. In order to get there, research has to be undertaken. For every meal you should start keeping tabs on the total potato consumption at the table, registering as well:

          - how many people were at the table,
          - how many potatoes were left over,
          - what was the size of the potatoes,
          - what they were served with,
          - what else did people eat this day, before the meal,
          - what was the weather like,
          - what was the atmosphere at the table,
          - did anyone fart,
          - were there any documentaries about brutal exploitation of
            potatoes on potato farms on television recently,
          - etc. etc.

With these statistics a computer program can figure out the rules of the game: which of the above parameters matter how much and whether there are other parameters we didn't think of yet. Then, when you start preparing a meal, simply feed the computer the variables it asks for, and it will calculate exactly how many potatoes you need to skin.

I predict, however, that it will also calculate how many potatoes will be left over anyway! Because no matter how well you try to estimate what is needed, a simple rule will prove you wrong time and time again: people never take all potatoes because they don't want to appear greedy.

So next time you worry what the poor children in Africa might think about the copious amounts of food piling up in your dust bin, remember that it's a civil gesture that produced the waste (2).

(1) Traditional Dutch cuisine:  a plate half full of vegetables cooked to a
    non-nutritionous pulp, half full of meat that has been cooking for a
    day, and half full of mealy potatoes saturated with gravy - I love it!
    See also my article on Dutch Stews.
(2) Also, in these times of economic setback this rule can be a nice way to
    save a buck (maybe not much when you look at one week, but on a yearly
    basis...).

See also

• Dutch Stews
• Tea
  /articles/2R29.html
• Poutine
  /articles/2R119.html