Kitchen Garden Forum

No, I don't mean talking potatoes - I am talking about baby potatoes!

I have lifted 6 rows of fantastic King Edward's today. After boxing them all, I was left with the tiny little marble-sized things that I remember being called "chats" when I was little. Being part Yorkshire, part Scot, there is no way I was going to throw them away - I washed them, boiled them briefly then added lashings of butter, chopped parsley, chives and a bit of basil. Mmm - delicious.

But this set me thinking - does anyone else call these baby potatoes "chats" or is it a regionalism?

Dear Bert, i must admit i have never heard them called chats before, in Milton Bryan we just call them baby potatoes.

Dear Mouse,
in Yorkshire and I suspect a lot of the traditional pig rearing areas they are called pig taties and are fed to same.
Regards Sally Wright

It's funny you should say that, Sally.
I have been Googling the expression, and this is the only dictionary definition I could find online for "chats":
Small potatoes, such as are given to swine.

What a waste, that's all I can say!!!

I was thinking Bangladeshi / Indian cuisine question....

Aloo chat.

In my 1941, 1961 and 1975 editions of RHS The Vegetable Garden Dispayed, there is a photgraph of the potato crop graded into "ware or eating" "seed" and "chats" - Incedentally, one of the gardeners photographed in the '41 edition is pictured, still at work, in the '75 copy.

The terms chats and ware potatoes is and has always been in my experience the names used to describe the potatoes you sell or those fed to stock.

Barney