Bluffton Free Street Fair vendors offer a variety of items boiled in liquid fat. Meat. Pastries. Cheese. Veggies include corn wrapped around meat on a stick, popped kernels ending with a sugar coating, and fish or pork coated with dust so they’ll crisp up and hold more of the fat before being served in a bun. It’s unhealthy, but one of the features that draws tens of thousands to the streets’ festivities.
Potatoes as fries, a Street Fair feature starting before the birth of any of today’s fair-goers, can be obtained as traditional sticks or wedges. Toppings besides salt are varied and optional.
In 1859, 39 years prior to Street Fair’s 1898 debut, a local newspaper offered tips to those planting potatoes. Potatoes grow “eyes” from which become the plant to produce a new generation. The eyes’ first nourishment comes from the white of the potato. Some plant a row of whole potatoes.
Someone discovered back in 1859 that only the eyes were needed to begin a plant. The remainder of the potato could be consumed. In 1789 Paris street vendors already sold French fries on the Pont Neuf bridge.
Use the point of a narrow knife and rim out the eyes on sprouting spuds. Plant the small eyes three to a hill. Separate hills by one foot. Cultivate to keep weeds down and the ground stirred and mellow, the news writer added. Potatoes grown in that way one and a half centuries ago ended up with a fine yield of large potatoes in every hill. No smalls, an important consideration at harvest. Zero diseased or unsound spuds were found in that growing method.
Angelkeep reverted back to the whole-potato-planting scheme last spring when a bag of finger potatoes were overlooked too long. Eyes turned to sprouts larger than the potatoes. Cutting off the eyes would have left little or nothing to eat, thus three whole potatoes begging to be planted received their dirt home in a damaged garbage pail filled with dirt used as a planter.
Last year that pot grew pole beans of Jolly Green Giant height. Green beans were picked off of a 12-foot step ladder. Angelkeep’s potato crop, as yet unearthed, grew five-foot vines up, over the bin rim, and to the ground. Perhaps the potatoes should have been harvested and displayed during Street Fair in the Community Building, as done by so many in days long ago.
Reminder: Try those five-foot long curly fries, or corkscrew potato chip-fries, at Street Fair with plenty of sea salt and ketchup. This variety began in Bluffton years ago when cut by a drill blade held in a mounted Craftsman electric hand drill.
Bluffton Free Street Fair cork-screw fries heaped high and overflowing on a paper dinner plate are not like Arby’s curly fries. That style can actually be traced back to an 1824 publication of “The Virginia Housewife.” Did that author steal a recipe from the Meuse Valle region of Namur, Spanish-Netherlands, when curly fries were popular in 1680?
Potatoes made the political stage in 1992 when Vice President Quayle became the lead news story by mistakenly correcting a sixth grade student’s spelling. VPOTUS suggested “potato-with-an-e.” Quayle was never “e”-lected to any political office again.
Angelkeep once grew potatoes with only peelings tossed into a compost pile after the preparation of some good old mashed spuds.
One absolute post-walleye sandwich must came as this year’s partaking of a Street Fair Nacho Potato sold on West Market. Order with plenty of jalapenos. This iconic local vendor offers a Taco Potato. Angelkeep never ate one. After a year’s craving for a nacho variety, the possibility of trying a Taco Potato was simply unthinkable. However, nachos with meat are supreme.
Don’t be fooled. Rice cauliflower never will substitute as spuds.
Brits and Aussies call French fries “chips,” as in fish and chips. Many Europeans call deep fried potatoes “pommes frites.” Some European vendors create them as deep fried, and then place them in a steamer to soften. It’s a preferred consumption style of non-Americans.
When will Bluffton Free Street Fair find a vendor offering French fries served under a ladle of sausage-bacon gravy?
Angelkeep will see you at “The Fair.”
Mr. Daugherty is a Wells County resident who, along with his wife Gwen, enjoy their backyard and have named it “Angelkeep.”
