Apartamento Cookbook #8

From Apartamento team: 

"This year's annual Apartamento cookbook is a return to our wobbly, chubby, hairy, bulgy, health-laden roots. Pía León's excellent 'Tuber Toast' (Cookbook
#7: Late-Night Meals) inspired a search through previous volumes for tubers.
We discovered these humble staples were barely present in our early books; aside from the occasional root, tubers were often relegated to the sidelines, never taking centre stage. How could we have overlooked all those good, foundational riches growing underground?
As we went through our TUBER CHECK, we also began to wonder, What even is a tuber? Shakespeare's famous lines from Hamlet took root in our ears: To be, or not to be, that is the question; Tuber, or Not Tuber was our question. With a bit of digging, we found that the Bard made mention of one of the world's most famous tubers; past Apartmento contributor Charles Perry laid it out in the Los Angeles Times:

'Let the sky rain potatoes', cried that old smoothie Sir John Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor. 'Let it thunder to the tune of "Greensleeves", hail
kissing-comfits and snow eryngoes'. All these things were considered aphrodisiacs in Shakespeare's time ... Mind you, the potato that Sir John considered the food of love was the sweet potato, not the French fry-type.

To begin in the dictionary, a tuber is 'the short, thick, round part of an underground stem or root of some plants which stores food and from which new plants grow'. Simple enough, but duelling infographics mapped differences between true bulbs, corms, tubers, tuberous roots, and rhizomes! To cover subterranean bases, 'roots and tubers' often get thrown together or grouped as 'root vege-tables'. Contributor Arielle Johnson, with a PhD in flavour, even wanted some wiggle room when asked for a definition; 'With the caveat that I'm not a plant scientist ... tubers are all root vegetables, but not all root vegetables are tubers'.
What sprung to light is just how versatile and universal these underground delights are. Roots are hearty, of course, and good for a stew; Thalia Barrios Garcia calls tuber broths a 'real hug on the tongue' as they 'feed both body and soul', but roots can also make exuberant cakes and drinks! They are threaded throughout the world; long before Shakespeare, Polynesian peoples are beleived to have crossed the Pacific, connecting with indigenous peoples in the Americas and bringing kümara or sweet potatoes home. From burdock in 'Spicy Pork Miso Soup' from Japan to vibrant chuguas and beautiful mashuas roasting in the Andean inspired 'Roots Cooked in an Earthen Oven', these recipes dance around the traditional ('Tortilla de Patatas') and the wild ('Fermented Garlic Honey'). From savoury to sweet, whatever your mood, whatever you need, we've got you covered with this tuber tour de force.
In celebration of tubers and non-tubers alike, uncanny yet seductive drawings by artist Olga Prader tempt us down into botanical flights of fancy, taking us deep-ly, delectably underground. Inspired by uncertainty and fuelled by delicious doubts, one thing is certain, we'll get to the root of this palatable predicament."