potatoes

Potatoes are fall and winter cooking at its most honest. They absorb everything around them — the brown butter and garlic you fold in, the Guinness gravy poured over bangers and mash, the tarragon-scented sauce in a chicken pot pie.

A perfectly mashed potato isn’t a simple thing: it’s about fat ratio, temperature, and knowing when to stop working the starch. These recipes treat mashed potatoes as a technique worth mastering, and then put that technique to work as the foundation for some of the most satisfying cold-weather cooking on this site.