I am watching a new Netflix movie based on the wonderful novel “All Quiet on the Western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque.
At one point the recruits are talking shit, peeling potatoes. It struck me this is something of an army-movie trope, I have seen it in comics, in movies etc.
But my understanding is that the best way to prepare potatoes is with the skin on.
Where does this army trope originate? Minor punishment for miscreants? A decision to limit nutrients by removing the skins?
I personally never remove the skin, even for mash, but that is because I am lazy.
I don’t know about the trope, but Alfred Wight (James Herriot) wrote that he, too, peeled a lot of potatoes while in the Royal Air Force, so it was a real thing.
In Navy boot camp, there is a service week (or used to be) where your company has to go work at the mess hall. This involves all manner of chores, including working in the kitchen. Seems to me that mashed potatoes were of the instant sort, and I don’t recall anyone having to peel raw spuds. My brother remembered having to do that chore, however, when he was in the Army in the 50s.
Because a lot (maybe most) people who make mashed potatoes intentionally don’t include the skins. Peeling the potatoes before mashing yields a more uniform and smooth result, and even if peeling removes some of the nutrients, the smooth texture is what a lot of people likely want.
At Great Lakes Naval Station Boot Camp there was absolutely potato peeling. I was thankfully on it only 1 day of hell week.
Easiest duty was keeping the little boxes of cereals stocked, I was on that one morning too. Most of the duty I can recall was just hauling large boxes around, swabbing and taking trash out.
That’s a pretty common thing to hear now, but I don’t remember it from my childhood in the 50’s and 60’s. Potatoes, other than baked potatoes, were almost always served peeled. Young “new” potatoes, which have smooth and tender skins much of which will scrub off when you wash them, were sometimes served with the skins on; but it’s highly unlikely that new potatoes were what was being shipped to the army, as in addition to the increased yield from letting them grow longer new potatoes don’t store as well or stand up as well to shipping damage as mature ones.
For me, this whole army potato peeling trope begs a different question.
If kitchen detail peeling piles of potatos is/was a common military chore or punishment, does that mean that the soldiers had to eat an excess of potatos?
I don’t think that prior to the last few decades it was possible to think of an ‘excess’ of potatoes.
In addition to peeled being the societal norm for mashed potatoes, ISTM that loads of spuds shipped to the army(especially as far back as as the WWI trenches) would not be of optimal quality. The skins would be bruised, full of eyes, and frequently moldy.
Military rations even today are long on starch. It’s cheap & keeps well. Same reason a lot of commercial buffet or family-style restaurants have lots of varieties of starches on offer.
It’s a thing that was done, and probably still is done.
I worked with a guy who spent some time in the Soviet army, and he described how he peeled potatoes (six slices quickly made it a peel-free parallelogram solid, and he didn’t care if that was wasteful).
My husband spent some time in West Point (visiting, not serving) and he said they served potatoes at every single meal. So yes.
Not so much an excess as just a lot of potatoes. A couple of hundred guys eat a lot of potatoes. And with potatoes, if you don’t have an automatic peeling machine, they have to be individually peeled by hand, so there’s a lot of labor needed to prepare a few hundred potatoes.
As for peeling vs. not, my mom used to peel every potato except those she planned to bake, for what it’s worth. These days, I tend to keep the skin on, so that’s one change.