22fun Want a Better Scone? Try Adding Potatoes.

ImageCredit...Photograph by Linda Xiao for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Paige Hicks.

In the world of anthropomorphic vegetables, potatoes loom large. For Americans, there is Mr. Potato Head of the blushing ears and startled eyebrows, the first toy ever featured in a TV commercial, in 1952. Early versions included face parts, felt hair and accessories (hats, glasses, pipe) but no potato; you had to provide your own. Investors initially feared that the toy would be seen as being in bad taste, not because turning potatoes into people is an eerie pastime but because the memory of wartime food shortages was still vivid. It seemed wrong to encourage wasting something that could make a meal.

Recipe: Potato Pete’s Potato Scones

Across the Atlantic, another little spud addressed precisely this issue a decade earlier. Potato Pete was the star of a recipe pamphlet distributed by the Ministry of Food in Britain during World War II, offering ways to stretch rations of flour and butter. More rakish than his American cousin, he sports a floppy hat, a piece of straw in his mouth and a giant fork slung on his shoulder (as much as a potato can have a shoulder). “Good taste demands I keep my jacket on,” he says on one page, a wink with a pragmatic motive: Cooking potatoes in their skins yields more “goodness and bulk,” the accompanying text explains. Readers are urged to eat a pound of potatoes every day, “if possible.”

A scone born of scarcity, but consumed with abundance in mind.

Potato Pete was no preacher of austerity. In the midst of deprivation, he promised indulgence, happily surrendering himself into the hands of cooks, ready to be boiled, steamed, mashed, roasted, baked, fried, scalloped, deviled and stuffed. The British historian Eleanor Barnett, whose smart, high-spirited account of food waste and preservation over the centuries, “Leftovers,” came out this year, was particularly curious about his recipe for teatime scones: It was a surprising treat given that at some points during the war, ice cream was banned — the Ministry of Food suggested, crushingly, eating carrots instead — and Britons were allotted as little as eight ounces of sugar a week. (Not to mention, and perhaps more devastating for the British soul, just two ounces of tea.)

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