I want to tell you about the year I fell in love with potatoes. Not the casual affection most people have for them — the kind that expresses itself in french fries and mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving — but a genuine, devoted, slightly obsessive love. The kind of love that makes you read books about the history of the potato and feel personally invested in the outcome.

It started, as many things do, with a difficult winter. My mother was ill and I was spending a lot of time at her house, cooking for her and trying to make things that she could eat and that would comfort her. She had lost her appetite almost entirely, which is one of the cruelest things illness does — it takes away one of the small pleasures that remain when everything else is hard.

Potatoes were one of the few things she would eat. Not fancy potatoes — not potatoes with cream and cheese and herbs, though I tried those too. Just simple potatoes, boiled or roasted, with a little butter and salt. The kind of food that asks nothing of you and gives everything back.

I started paying attention to potatoes in a way I never had before. I learned that there are hundreds of varieties, each with its own texture and flavor and best use. I learned that the potato was brought to Europe from South America in the sixteenth century and that it changed the world — that it fed the poor of Ireland and Germany and Russia through centuries of hardship, and that its failure caused one of the worst famines in modern history.

I learned to make potato soup that was silky and rich without any cream. I learned to roast potatoes so that they were crispy on the outside and fluffy within, which requires more technique than you might think. I learned that a good potato, simply cooked, is one of the most satisfying things you can eat — and that there is no shame in that simplicity.

My mother got better, slowly. She started eating more. One afternoon she asked me to make her the roasted potatoes again, the ones with the rosemary, and I stood in her kitchen making them and felt something that I can only describe as gratitude — for the potatoes, for the rosemary, for the fact that she was there to eat them. Food is love, in the end. It always has been.