A Small Stone Number 16

Whenever I cook roast potatoes and I do often, two or  three times a month, I think of my mother's Sunday dinners...lamb a soft lavender grey with fat the colour of cream, the rich nearly-burnt brown of the beef joint and the pallid chicken, served up in chunky slices with a watery gravy that tasted of disappointment. But it is my mother's potatoes that I remember most vividly. They really should have been crisper: they failed every acceptable culinary standard, but oh, how they tasted. Cooked in fat from roasting the Sunday's  joint, under my mother's gaze the par boiled King Edward's would turn a gentle butterscotch in an oven that wasn't quite hot enough. She would turn them out and shrug: not much good again while I would try to steal a golden mouthful when she wasn't looking.