Potato with Courtney McBroom

“Boil ’em, mash ’em, stick ’em in a stew.” That line from The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is one of the most quoted food references in movie history—except the scene contains no potatoes at all. Samwise Gamgee is complaining that he has no potatoes, yet millions of viewers, including the hosts of Recipe Club, have mentally inserted a bubbling cauldron of tubers into the memory. That kind of collective false memory, known as the Mandela effect, is a fitting entry point for an episode that treats the potato not just as a vegetable but as a cinematic character, a survival tool, and a lens for class, culture, and craft.

The episode brings together Chris Yang, Dave Chang, and guest Courtney McBroom—a chef and food consultant—to examine three wildly different potato scenes in film: the obscure 1995 race-swap drama White Man’s Burden, Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Ridley Scott’s The Martian. Each scene uses the potato differently: as a marker of class and habit, as a medium for obsession, and as a literal lifeline. The conversation weaves together cooking technique, food history, and cinematic analysis, all while eating McBroom’s crispy comeback potatoes from her cookbook Party People.

The Salt-in-the-Ketchup Move: Class and Control in White Man’s Burden