Why I resisted potato bread for so long is a question I’m not psychologically prepared to answer. My idiotic prejudices and repressions, the arbitrary condemnations, the wholesale resistance to things that everybody else loves — these are matters for psychology, not food blogs. But whatever the reason for my dismissal of potato bread, what folly it was! Have you ever had it? The most famous brand is Martin’s, whose hamburger buns I also resisted, and still do. I will never use Martin’s potato buns! But the bread has changed my life.

It’s thick, and moist, and sweet. If you make a grilled cheese sandwich with it, be prepared to add some salt, or it will almost veer into petit-four territory. But for certain uses, it’s incomparable. This was the bread they were thinking of when they invented French Toast, or should have been. It caramelizes gorgeously as soon as it hits the pan, and because it’s so sweet and dense, you can can dip it into eggs without getting soggy or disintegrating, as is so often the case with white bread. You can spread a little cold Presidente butter on it, and it it straight up, as Italian-Americans like to do with their loaf of untoasted sliced bread on the Sunday table. But I’ve found a more perfect use for it. I eat it, untoasted, as sandwich bread.

Just in the last week, I have made the following sandwiches.

* smoked mackerel, cold and salty and greasy, with a thick slice of bermuda onion. That’s it. But the sweetness of the bread matches the saltiness and acid of the fish, and the whole thing goes down easier than any bagel ever did.

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* Fried scrapple. It’s not enough to slice scrapple thin. Given that it’s essentially a solid form of pork-liver pudding, you need to really press it flat so that it’s nothing but crispy surface. But all that crispy, crunchy, livery goodness, once enveloped by the maternal toothsome dough, really pops in contrast. I was reminded of Blake’s line about a crying baby: “helpless, naked, piping loud / like a fiend hid in a cloud.” That’s what that scrapple was like.

* Bacon! You didn’t think I would find a bread like this and not make a bacon sandwich, did you? I toasted it, spread it with margarine, and laid five pieces of undrained thick-sliced bacon. (In this case, Nueske’s. Wait til I get my hands on some Benton’s!)

I am thinking of new applications for this potato bread all the time. Who cares if it is sweeter and denser than Wonder bread? The world is big enough to like more than one bread.

Josh Ozersky is the national restaurant editor for Citysearch, and newly-converted zealot for Team Rachael. He writes Citysearch’s New York food blog, The Feedbag, but will be writing every week here on topics that aren’t all tied up with the comings and goings of the New York restaurant world, his usual sphere of authority. Along with meat, that is — he’s also the author of The Hamburger: A History, coming to you soon in paperback.

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