Update: Well, after trying this in the Consolationland test kitchen, my admiration for Mrs. Morgan’s cooking knows no bounds. She must have been a great alchemist as a cook, with better vegetables. Mine after all that simmering had the texture and taste of sink sponges and were a mess to peel. Long cooking can be convenient when one has a stove fired up all day, powered up by a mountain of coal. But it can bring out a rank flavor, especially for folks with a gene that makes them sensitive to the bitterness in brassica vegetables. The starch really clogged up the Cuisinart too.

Well, it was an interesting craft to try, and it’s good to learn by doing. Next time I’ll peel the vegetables first, dice them small, and roast crisp with oil and salt, or flash-boil in a little water until fork-tender one vegetable at a time before mashing.

In Richard Llewellyn’s book, narrator Huw Morgan describes two recipes. Here is the simple one, a dish called Potch.

The book explains that one should simmer winter vegetables gently, whole in their peels. Then

… skin them clean, and put them in a dish and mash with a heavy fork, with melted butter and the bruising of mint, potatoes, swedes, carrots, parsnips, turnips and their tops, then chop purple onions very fine, with a little head of parsley, and pick the leaves of small watercress from the stems, and mix together. The potch will be a creamy colour with something of pink, having a smell to tempt you to eat there and then, but wait until it has been in the hot oven for five minutes with a cover, so that the vegetables can mix in warm comfort together and become friendly, and the mint can go about his work, and for the cress to show his cunning, and for the goodness all about….

Here it was at our local chain grocery, US dollars and English vs metric weights.

$1.94 $3.00/lb. Parsnips (2 smallish)

$1.40 $2.29/lb. Turnip purple top

$2.12 $2.49/lb. Rutabaga, or Swede.

$1.37 $1.49/lb. Potato Irish russet

$0.60 $1.49/lb. Carrot

$7.43 total

“Say, you should add in the cost of those greens. You didn’t buy them.” Yes, in the dark and rain I went out and snipped off a handful of leek, daikon, and turnip greens that grew in the garden all winter, and threw in some dried peppermint. So the garnish was free. Except for hauling home topsoil last summer plus toting about 100 buckets of vegetable rinse water down 42 steps and around the corner to water the patch.

“You forgot to count the butter pat.” Okay, butter pat or two. Dash of rice milk. Salt & paprika. So, close to $8.00 for the whole batch of potch.

“What! I could sell you a whole bushel of that stuff for the same price,” someone with farmland in Montana might be saying. I wish you would.

On the internet a search for Potch gets you many conflicting accounts and etymologies, a whole hotch-potch, from all over Northern Europe. One confusion was the names for vegetables. When I was a kidlet in the 50s, I’d never seen a purple top turnip. To us, “turnips” meant the rutabagas in my German grandmother’s kitchen. They were much larger and darker orange and sweet than any I can find today. Gramma peeled, cooked, and mashed them through a metal ricer, and added heavy cream, butter, and salt. Mm.

This looks like a proper Potch recipe below, though 3 hours seems long for simmering vegetables.

https://americymru.net/americymru/blog/4199/welsh-soul-food-potch

By today’s grocery standards, this is pricey for a coal mining family staple. But the $8 should make two solid noon meals. To go with the menu I also picked up a pound of lentils and a pound of green split peas, for $2.79 apiece. They will expand a good bit when soaked. The lentils triple in size when sprouted to the tiny leaf stage. Either item cooked up will make at least 4 servings apiece, making the meal more budget-friendly.