The first potatoes I loved were the dehydrated shreds sold in cereal box-style cartons at Key Foods. My mother gave them some delicacy, stirring in milk, butter, salt. On holidays her mashed potatoes were perfect, and doted on accordingly. They were adjusted hourly for flavour and texture, refrigerated overnight, and reheated slowly on the day. Her instant mashed potatoes took about ten minutes but I savoured each morsel carefully, my fork probing a texture that was almost – if you were slow and meticulous in your tasting – that of a deep yellow-fleshed tuber mashed just so, creamed just so, salted just so.

This is not a story about the kitchen, necessarily, but I have to give some context for my love of instant mashed potatoes. I grew up in an atypically snobby food household. My father had prepared some beautiful potatoes for me – potatoes cubed and cooked high until brown, then low and slow until they were butter on your tongue. In the winter, we boiled dozens of potatoes and invited friends over to melt cheese and grill vegetables for raclette. Those were the vessels for my young experimentation in sauces and mush, a staple of my young adult diet. The instant mashed potatoes of a Wednesday night had that ephemeral quality that we so unfortunately seek in lovers sometimes. Those little shreds were not quite the potato, but they gestured so well at the potato that they gave the impression that we might, should we dig our feet in further, achieve the fullness of some idyllic spud – internal moisture with the full-bodiedness to offer cream and not chalk, browned edges that give you salty caramel where there isn’t, something soft but upright, the little buoyant pillows of perfect gnocchi. The instant potato won’t do it all. But it does make the tongue yearn a bit, and sometimes that can be enough, especially if you have a family to feed and the time scarcity and financial limitations felt by the average American household.

The instant mashed potatoes Americans now know were, in fact, born of a need to emulate the feelings and nutrition of a homemade meal. Like so many of our experimentations in industrial food, instant mashed potatoes were introduced as a product to feed the military during World War Two. Their integration into mainstream culinary culture was pioneered by a similar niche in the market for nostalgia – in an age where women increasingly participated in the workplace but the marketing industry remained rife with the symbolism of the woman as homemaker, instant potatoes promised 1960s American households the immortality of the mother, an eternality to docile women and soft, buttery dinners.

I was not raised with an emotional attachment to my mother’s culinary submission. To the contrary, my mother prepared her holiday potatoes as a kind addition to the many other dishes otherwise made by my father. Her weekday instant mashes were perhaps so close to my heart because they were an anomaly – my father did most of the cooking, and he did it splendidly. I began to cook with my father not out of an expectation that I should practice for my eventual role as homemaker, but rather to avoid the dinner table. And I learned to cook potatoes in college because while I was then content to eat hummus and canned beans for most meals, I felt it was important to make one thing very well so that when people came over, I could demonstrate love in the way that it had been demonstrated to me.

The first dish I learned to prepare was gratin dauphinoise, an obvious crowd-pleaser. At its worst, it is simply a medley of thick cream and thick cheese and thick potatoes, which are delicious things. At its best, it is a triumph of thin slivers of soft, crisp potato with a creaminess that is both something you bite into and its own texture, layered with gruyere and a savoury subtext of warmth, a soft glow at the dining room table of someone you love (thyme, rosemary, black pepper). I didn’t know much about cooking, but I did know that the quality of milk was important. When I wanted to impress his parents, I sent my college boyfriend on a mad search through Miami supermarkets for something with a bit of life (did Miami not have Ronnybrook?). The gratin impressed, though my obsession with perfectly thin slices and the disinterest of my boyfriend in spending the duration of my cutting, boiling, mixing, and fretting alongside me cast a moodiness over my relationship for the two hours that I spent preparing this testament to my generous heart and clear suitability for their son.

I didn’t cook much gratin after that, until years later when I was in love with a man who liked to cook from books. He made a good dinner but in his commitment to perfectionism could not smell, taste, or feel a dish so much as follow the text on a page. He made me a gratin once, chunkier and cheesier than mine but warm with pepper and certainly more full than gesturing. The thing about food is that you can try to package it perfectly as if from a book, but everyone will taste the nuances of your hand on the knife, your fingers in the salt, the butter you selected and the pace at which you moved about your kitchen that evening. I think I was in love with his pace in the kitchen, so slow and solemn alongside my freneticism.

Cookbooks have a long history in the United States and globally, the popularity of a given theme often coinciding with political and economic circumstances. The late twentieth-century United States saw a proliferation of instructional cooking, from television cooking shows to a rise in celebrity food writers. Today there are cookbooks for people who want to eat hyper-locally and for those recreating dishes from a far-away home; cookbooks for people with fifteen minutes to spare and others five hours; cookbooks for the dinner party host and cookbooks for the solitary. There are cookbooks the way there are self-help books. While the diversity of texts on eating and living suggests an expansiveness, I cannot help but wonder at an age that offers the chance less to taste and respond to the contents of a pan, and more to hone in on instructions for how to wake up in the morning, move one’s body, ask for the calm attention of a friend.

My recipe-abiding love was not the sort of person to make instant mashed potatoes, but nor was he one to add his own levels of creaminess and depth. His gratin did not make me yearn for the food’s idyllic form so much as for its reality, for a bit more of the potato and a bit less of the garnish. Drawn as I am to craving, I made him gratin too, hoping that he could taste that I loved him in the thinness of each slice, in the way each morsel of potato was softened just so, in a bath of cream and remnants of herbs boiled in and then discarded.

There are pathologies for people who seek relationships structured on yearning, dictionaries that name the sort of mind which longs for a person who is withholding. I know that we all benefit from a bit of probing into our various psychological undoings, but I can’t help but see my origins in the way that a box of instant mashed potatoes fills me with love and loneliness at the same time. If boxes and books are an altar to craving, I know that the mashed potatoes my mother made at holidays are satiety. And yet, the first potatoes I loved left something to be desired, but nonetheless had such a proximity to satisfaction that a child, aged seven and not very interested in food or sitting patiently, could imagine it was a perfectly boiled mash of starch, cream, and fat, and think that yes, really, this was her favourite food.

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Anne-Laure White is a farmer, cartographer, and learning ecologist from Brooklyn, New York. Food has been a foundational lens onto socio-economic inequities, land, and, as we see in this short piece, herself.