I’m usually pretty dubious about foods presented in quotation marks. Typically it means someone’s trying to sell me something I’m not all that interested in buying. Like when I’m traveling abroad and someone offers me a “biscuit” and I’m all, “um, I’m pretty sure that’s a cookie.” These liars don’t speak in quotes, but trust me, it’s implied.

So why the quotes anyway? Potatoes are pretty straight forward; it’s either a potato or it isn’t. While this recipe falls under the isn’t, it’s also under might as well be, and here’s why….

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***Pre-post: You might not have heard, but I’m giving away a $50 Williams Sonoma gift card! No strings attached. I won’t make you grovel for it, though I’d like to. You just have to go to this post to enter. /pre-post***      CONTEST IS CLOSED. Congratulations to the winner, Denise M., who is going to put the $50 gift card toward a dutch oven!

I know exactly why you’re giving me that stink face, and for the most part I’m right there with you. When anchovies are slandered high and low, with their presence in any dish a criminal offense worthy of cook’s castration, it’s hard to want to give them a chance.

When I was a kid, I offered them a chance at overcoming the libelous venom directed toward their existence in American cuisine. I ordered a pizza whose crisped mozzarella was crosshatched with slick bodies of salted anchovies and figured, how bad could they really be? That uneaten pizza has been festering in a dump somewhere for the last fifteen years.

Anchovies, to be polite, taste like grizzly bear grundle in the summer. They’re only about nine shades more favorable than sepsis, and the smell does them no kind favors either. But sometimes even the most foul of ingredients can be used for good.

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