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skin, or most of it – and you can pick up the few straggly bits that get through the net – stays inside the ricer. Otherwise, if it’s a necessary bowl of mashed potato just for one that you’re after, I suggest you bake the potatoes (Marfona are best here) for 1–1½ hours at 220°C/gas mark 7 and then just scrape out the flesh and fork it fluffy in a bowl with the milk and butter: greater expenditure on fuel but very little in effort. Plus you get to eat the crunchy skins: divine with a good sprinkling of Maldon salt and a dribble of extra-virgin olive oil.
    Mashed potato always seems to taste best if the milk or cream you add to it is warm; I just stick a jug in the microwave with the milk and butter and heat for a minute or so and then pour in while beating. And even if you’re using a potato ricer, you do need to beat. A wooden spoon will do: the point is you need to get air into it.
    I hesitate before giving quantities, so please regard the specifications below as the merest guidelines. This is about how much you need per person, but then, I would not be appalled to eat a bowl of mash myself made from 500g raw weight of potatoes. It may well be, too, that you don’t like your mashed potato as buttery and creamy as I do; I have learnt that there are many people with more austere tastes than mine, though I’m not sure here is the place to indulge them. And – as seems to be the rule with cooking – the more people you have eating, the less per head they seem to need.
    250–350g potato, such as Maris Piper or King Edward, per person
    approx. 75g warm full-fat milk or cream
    approx. 50g unsalted butter
    salt and pepper, preferably white
    freshly grated nutmeg
    Boil the halved or chunked (but unpeeled) potatoes in a large pan of salted water. When they are soft enough to mash, drain them thoroughly then push the potato pieces through a potato ricer.
    With a wooden spoon, beat in the warm milk or cream and butter and season with salt, pepper and some freshly grated nutmeg to taste. Eat alone and straight from the bowl, for the quintessential comfort food.
    SALMON FISHCAKES
    This is one of the most comforting suppers I know and has the great virtue of being both a storecupboard standby and a useful way of using leftover mashed potato. A useful way, too, of using up cold boiled potatoes – just push them through the masher and proceed as normal. If the mashed potato has been very buttery and soft to start with they will be harder to mould, but not impossible; you may just find you need to give a sturdier coating of matzo meal before frying. Talking of which, I often do this somewhat differently than specified below: I make the patties, then freeze them (on a clingfilmed baking sheet) until hard, then bag them up; when I want to eat them, I dip them, stonily unthawed, into the egg and matzo meal, fry them on both sides in hot oil until golden and then sit them on kitchen towel in a baking tray in an oven preheated to 120°C/gas mark ½ for about 40 minutes or until warmed through. And you could leave them here for about 3 hours without doing any damage.
    The reason I use matzo meal rather than breadcrumbs is that I find bought breadcrumbs horrible and I am presuming that for an undemanding recipe like this you are not going to want to plan ahead and busy yourself making them from fresh. Matzo meal is now anyway widely available at supermarkets, and well worth keeping in store. And I use tinned salmon here because I think, strangely enough, that’s how they taste best (if it’s good enough for Marguerite Costa, it’s good enough for me) and it means you can have the wherewithal for these about the place at all times. I do have to warn, though, that, the unfried mixture smells absolutely vile. Just hold on to the thought that, once cooked, it tastes wonderful. And with these fat bronzed coral slabs, I suggest frozen peas and tomato ketchup. I don’t even like tomato ketchup much but just as with shepherd’s pie,