THE POTATO AT HOME 315 
staying if she had ever tasted a potato boiled in 
its jacket. Yes, she had, once only, and didn’t 
like it because it didn’t taste like a potato—such 
a funny flavour! 
That “funny” flavour, so unlike the taste of 
the tuber boiled and water-logged in the homely 
English way, is precisely the flavour which makes 
it so nice to eat and so valuable as food; also, if 
I may slip in the personal pathology or idiosyn- 
cratic abnormality, so perfect a cure for indigestion. 
It is, in fact, the taste imparted by the salts which 
mostly lie close beneath the skin, and are con- 
sequently thrown away when the potato is peeled 
before boiling. You cannot avoid this waste by 
scraping your potato, since scraping removes the 
waterproof skin, and, the skin gone, the boiling 
water saturates the potato and carries the salts 
away. 
This is a serious matter in these days, when— 
as some of the newspapers say—we are trying to 
economise in the matter of food, and when the 
potato is beginning to be talked about. I suppose 
that there are about thirty or forty millions of us 
who consume about half a pound of potatoes every 
day; and it is not only the case that hundreds of 
tons of excellent food are thrown away every day in 
the peeling process, but that the most valuable 
elements in the potato are wasted. Perhaps the 
war will teach us to value the potato properly, as, 
I believe, it is and always has been valued in most 
countries outside these islands. 
