Give up mashed potatoes?

With Thanksgiving around the corner, many cooks are looking for ways to vary the alleged monotony of the traditional holiday meal. For me in years past, this motive has led to not always successful experiments with pumpkin ravioli, cranberry soup, and coconut creamed greens. But unless you have unlimited oven space, adding a new dish to the menu often must come at the expense of getting rid of an old one.

Which raises an interesting question: Which traditional Thanksgiving food would you be willing to forego this year? Some might choose cranberries, others stuffing, and still others the turkey itself. Even a few might pick pumpkin pie. But no one I know would vote to get rid of mashed potatoes. They have become perhaps the principal side dish at the Thanksgiving feast.

It's ironic, to say the least, that mashed potatoes are so widely coupled with Thanksgiving, because at the first Thanksgiving there were no mashed potatoes. In fact, there were no potatoes at all. It would take almost a hundred years before potatoes were served at Thanksgiving and even longer before they were prepared by mashing. That's because potatoes, though a New World crop originally cultivated around 3000 B.C. by the ancient Incas in what is now Peru, were not known to the Pilgrims. They were a South American vegetable, not a North American one.

The potato would have to travel first to Europe, thanks to the Spanish conquistadors, and then return to these shores before it could become a staple crop in this country, aided by the experiments of one of America's most adventurous farmers, Thomas Jefferson, who was the first to introduce French fries to his countrymen. According to some accounts, it was Sir Francis Drake who introduced America to the potato when on the way back from battling the Spanish in the Caribbean he stopped in Cartagena and picked up some potatoes, which he subsequently left in Virginia.

Though traces of prehistoric "mashed" (actually crushed) potatoes have been found going back thousands of years, the first recorded recipe for the dish as we know it is found in 1747 in a book by Hannah Glasse, the Julia Child of her day. (Full title, "The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, Which Far Exceeds Any Thing of the Kind yet Published.")

Boiled potatoes get mashed before being subjected to an onslaught of butter--a full pound of it--to create a version of the holiday staple worthy of any Thanksgiving feast.Submitted by Tom Harte

As influential as Glasse's recipe may have been, however, the person most responsible for the popularity of potatoes was a Frenchman named Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, whose legacy lives on in the name of any number of French potato recipes, such as Potage Parmentier, potato and leek soup.

Parmentier was captured and imprisoned during the Seven Years' War and kept on a ration of potatoes, a food considered only good for animal feed in France at the time. He survived without ill effects and gratefully set about promoting the potato, relying partially on calculated publicity stunts. The clever Monsieur Potato Head, for example, gifted the queen with bouquets of potato flowers.

Glasse and Parmentier, no doubt, would agree with the most recent proponent of the potato, the late chef Joel Robuchon, whose recipe for mashed potatoes was responsible in no small part for his 31 Michelin stars. You don't need fancy add-ins for decadent mashed potatoes, he contended, just a few ingredients: potatoes, salt, cream and a little butter. Actually, a lot of butter. Robuchon's prescription calls for a whole pound of butter for two pounds of potatoes. With a ratio like that, this spud's for you.

Thanksgiving-Worthy Mashed Potatoes

Adapted from Joel Robuchon, this recipe is one you'll be thankful to have at your holiday meal.

• 2 pounds Yukon Gold, yellow fingerlings or German Butterball potatoes
• 1 pound butter
• 1/4 cup warm cream
• Salt to taste

Cover unpeeled potatoes with water and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to simmer and cook for 35 to 40 minutes until tender. Drain, peel and let cool briefly. Mash potatoes, return to pot, and heat over medium heat until steam comes off bottom of pot. Add butter five or so tablespoons at a time, incorporating each addition almost fully before adding the next. Stir in cream until incorporated, season with salt, and stir potatoes rapidly until fluffy.