And, as noted in the link I shared earlier, the potato varieties which are starchier, and yield the best, fluffiest mashed potatoes (such as russets), also tend to be the varieties with thicker skins.
I was in Air Force basic training in 1980, and while our flight had KP once for a week, I never had to peel potatoes. Instead, I was stuck on the dishwashing detail (not by hand, but the large automatic washers with sliding doors on both sides.
Well, the first morning I opened the doors of that dishwasher and a shitload of cockoaches came swarming out. They went everywhere, including the big vat of pancake batter that was churning. I yelled to the sarge in charge of the kitchen, but he said to ignore them and to keep the batter going. He had hundreds of men to feed.
So that’s what we did and watched the cockroaches get ground up in the batter.
I still haven’t eaten a pancake since then.
My recollection is that the regulations of the veterinary college at the time didn’t allow self-promotion/advertising, so he had to use a pseudonym for his books.
He picked “herriot” because of its feudal meaning, linking to animals:
- a tribute paid to a lord out of the belongings of a tenant who died, often consisting of a live animal or, originally, military equipment that he had been lent during his lifetime.
We had two solid weeks of it in SD because they were backed up on graduating companies. After two weeks of getting up at 4 a.m. and going to bed at 11 p.m., we were basket cases.
How recently did they have new recruits peeling potatoes or doing other KP duty? Because doesn’t the army now outsource food service to an outside vendor, even at domestic bases?
No clue, my experience was in the 80s.
Sorta. Certainly peeling with a knife takes off some of the good stuff. But a tater has several layers of skin, and the outermost, especially on Russets- is kinda nasty. The outermost layer has little nutritional benefit, it is the thin layer under that that has Good stuff.
Yep. But after baking, you can peel that thin layer off, while leaving the layer under that on- sometimes.
I think a significant factor here is that all militaries, everywhere, have had a lot of make-work. You want a lot of men available when the shit hits the fan, but that’s only a tiny fraction of the time. All the rest of the time, you’ve got lots and lots of bored men, mostly not fully mature, trained for high aggression and with access to lots of dangerous hardware. You absolutely need to find some way to keep them busy, or they’ll find their own ways. So you peel potatoes. You swab the decks. You dig holes and then fill them back in. You go on long runs. You do whatever you can.
EEEEK! Did anyone they were served to say anything, or even notice?
Add “green” to it. Not only is the green area toxic if eaten in large amounts, it tastes terrible.
This is what happens when they are stored too long in light.
I suspect the “Army Way” to prepare potatoes is to boil the hell out of them and get them ready for the next wave of troops into the mess tent. Leaving the skin on takes longer to boil, and while I’ve never had one, a boiled potato with the skin on sounds profoundly unappetizing, Ergo, the optimal way to prepare a lot of potatoes at once is to peel them, then boil them.
As company yeoman when I was there in 1980, I was excused from the detail.
Neener.
Especially in the field where stews are probably the easiest meals to prepare and distribute.
My memory from 50’s childhood was that (Army) miscreants were sentenced to KP (“Kitchen Patrol”) which was comically illustrated with a guy peeling potatoes with a knife. I have absolutely no idea if any of this was factual.
No idea about the army, but I know potatoes grow in the dirt and have to be thoroughly cleaned. Often enough, what looks like a dark patch of skin is a stubborn clump of dirt. Might as well peel ‘em while you’re at it, and, often enough, that will reveal a rotten spot. Green parts, too, which are to be avoided, as noted upthread.
As a general rule, I peel all vegetables before cooking and don’t eat the skin on meats. Without any knowledge of the science involved, I figure the outermost layer is designed to keep nastiness out and prefer not to eat it.
They do outsource food preparation to outside vendors but at least in the 90s in areas with a ton of new recruits like bases with boot camps or training centers they’d would have the new recruits once a week assigned to all day kitchen duty as basically free labor for the vendor. It was mainly just washing dishes, cleaning the kitchen and moving boxes around as I don’t remember ever actually touching the food itself but I heard they would do it if the vendor was short staffed.
I mainly remember though the civilian vendor would power trip like crazy despite the fact they were civilians and we were all privates or p1c’s in the later stages. I just graduated as a Private First Class but still have to help you out and you’re threatening to report me to whoever because when you told me to mop the bathroom floor I had the balls to take a piss first before actually mopping? Fuck off.
I suspect the military tradition of peeling potatoes goes back far beyond our knowledge of the skins’ nutritive value, so it almost certainly was not a concern.
In addition to being cheap and plentiful in peacetime, I would think potatoes are pretty easy for an army to forage in the field. Any countryside they’re going to be marching through will likely have farms whose owners cultivate them.
They’re also filling and easy to prepare—no culinary knowledge or experience required. The same is true of beans, another military staple. Just drop them in water and boil.
Personally, I use a vegetable peeler to peel potatoes; it’s faster, safer, easier, and wastes less of the potato. I would hope that the U.S. Army, as one of the premier potato-peeling operations in the world, would have a couple of them lying around for folks to use.
Yep, potato peeling was a fact of life and somebody had to do it. But, by the Korean war we had potato peeling machines. It was a rotating cylinder with a coarse, abrasive internal surface. It turned just fast enough to tumble the potatos so that the abrasive scraped off the skin. One GI could do a couple of hundred pounds in an hour.
I went through Army Basic Training in 1987. The training platoons rotated through various duty details, one of which being KP.
Yes, we peeled potatoes on KP–using the rotating cylinder contraption. You had to crank it manually, though. I assume by now there’s a “push button and wait for the magic” version, but we didn’t have that luxury.
The main thing I remember about KP duty was that I was totally wiped out by the end of the day. Sure, you expect to be wiped out after road marches or heavy-duty PT, but KP is garrison duty. And it still wiped me out.