That thick Germanic accent, in a voice so earthy you could grow spuds in it, is a reminder of the dream.
That something is in part what draws travelers to the Aran Islands: it takes an independent character to live perversely on three spits of barren limestone in the north Atlantic, the way they do, in a place where you couldn't even grow spuds unless you created your own sad scrum soil with a kind of layered-kelp composting.
Some people grow spuds in garbage cans, stacked tires, wire fencing rolls, and in other unique structures.
At home I use workmen's black buckets with holes in the bottom, and I grow everything: spuds and beans and all sorts of things.
But the slogan on the wall — "Burgers for people who give a damn" — and a boastful emphasis on local ingredients — "cows reared in Pendeen, spuds grown near Marazion" — won me over.
Once there, they ambled through the bucolic vegetable patch and past the Normandy-style farm buildings, before settling in for lunch from the property's celebrated eatery, Blue Hill: crisp produce plucked from just yards away, whipped potatoes made with an experimental strain of spuds grown by a Cornell University professor, airy brioche baked from a new breed of wheat.
The growing trouble with Mazher's scoops is that he's the pastry cook and head confectioner as well as the spud peeler.
So David Spooner, a horticulturist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and a researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, decided to analyze those island spuds, making the assumption that whatever variety of potato grows there must be the kind that first traveled toward Europe.
Although The Observer allotment also suffered (the locals had said blight was endemic there) I was pleased to see a sack laid on the ground and covered with spuds that managed to grow to size before the blight kicked in.
