Rocha-chatter

Summer in Rochester means festivals and festivals mean festival food. There's funnel cake, butterfly fries and cups of lemonade the size of your head.

But one of my favorite summer festival foods is more basic. Salt potatoes. Little potatoes boiled in salt and served drenched in melted butter. Oh yum!

I never had salt potatoes until I moved to Rochester, and goodness knows I'd had a lot of potatoes up until that point. A little googling and it turns out that salt potatoes are a regional dish of Central New York.

Wikipedia says.... "The Syracuse, New York area has a long history of salt production. Salt springs located around Onondaga lake were used to create consumable salt that was distributed through out the north-east via the Erie Canal. The salinated water was laid out to dry on large trays, the salt residue was then scraped up, ground, and packaged. Salt potatoes were created in the nineteenth century by Irish immigrants who worked the springs. The first packaged salt potatoes were sold in the 1960s."

I have bought the bags of potatoes that come packaged with a little bag of salt at Wegmans and made my very own salt potatoes at home... but somehow it's not the same as eating them on the street in front of a local band.

Labels: food