Americana: Small Potatoes

For House Speaker Tip O’Neill’s ancestors in Ireland, potatoes were a dietary staple, the only means of survival. The potato blight struck, and they migrated to America. So the side dish that O’Neill discovered at the fashionable Prime Rib restaurant in Washington boiled his ancestral blood: fried potato peels at $2.50 a portion. “Two-fifty!” he exclaimed. “And there’s no potato!”