Taking this to the International Court of FoodTribe: potato scallop or potato cake?

Here in Australia, we’ve had a relatively good run with the pandemic - as a result, everything’s open, bars run late and busy, weddings can happen if they’re not Greek - but it could be said that some of the federation spirit that brought 6 British colonies with different train gauges together is lacking.

In the last year we’ve had a Victorian Premier wonder aloud why anyone would want to go to South Australia anyway, a bored Western Australian Premier wade into a fight between a Queensland Premier and a New South Wales and call one a hypocrite, and we’ve heard a cry from the impassioned heart of the acting Premier of NSW to his counterpart in Western Australia: WHY DON’T YOU BECOME PART OF THE BLOODY COUNTRY ALREADY? Oh, and we’ve been behind our relevant Premier every time, cheering them on.

It’s in this environment that I want to take one of the greatest Australian interstate debates to an international jury. It’s the question of whether that deep fried alternative to Britain’s mushy peas as something you get with your fish and chips, is called a potato scallop - like NSW and Queensland know it is - or a potato cake, like Victoria and parts of South Australia and Western Australia insist.

ME, AUSTRALIAN CAPITAL TERRITORY, FOR "POTATO SCALLOP"

I know it looks like a nugget but I ate the better scallops before realising I'd actually bought them for an editorial reason

I know it looks like a nugget but I ate the better scallops before realising I'd actually bought them for an editorial reason

In the US, you have a dish we’d call potato bake, but which you might call scalloped potatoes - involving potatoes cut very thin and round and baked with a sauce or cheese. There’s two important points here: firstly, you probably don’t find yourself confusing the dish with the seafood. Secondly, the idea of thinly sliced potatoes cooked with a coating should not be too incongruous with the Australian takeaway idea of thinly sliced potatoes deep fried in batter. 



Hence, potato scallops. If you saw that on the menu in a delightful greasy-walled little Australian fish and chip shop, you’d have a pretty reasonable guess what it'd look like.

The potato cake definition meanwhile is misleading, as cakes involve more than a deep-fried thin pocket of something. A fish cake, for instance, is fish mince with flour and egg, and you’d expect any potato equivalent to be the same texture and thickness. Thus you, a tourist trying to buy a nice greasy dinner, would be misled.

PATRICK JACKSON, SOUTH AUSTRALIA, FOR POTATO CAKE

There's something in the water, or deep frying oil, when you go this far South

There's something in the water, or deep frying oil, when you go this far South

Living in South Australia, I should probably be flying the flag for the name ‘potato fritter’ here – not least as it’s probably a more apt descriptor than either name proposed here – but with usage of the terms potato fritter and potato cake being 50/50 here, I’m going to stick to my guns as a Victorian by birth and keep calling it a potato cake, as I always have and will.

I refute Johnny-boy’s claims of a potato cake being misleading in comparison to a fish cake, as while a potato cake may well be thinner than a fish cake, the lack of thickness is offset by the larger diameter, leaving them only fractionally less filling as a result. (Side note: it’s not the same thickness as a scallop either, John.) And sure, there may be that crispy outside layer of batter, but that potato-y centre still melts in the mouth.

If we want to talk about a misleading definition, referring to this utterly delicious deep fried treat as a scallop is the terminology I would say commits the worse crime, as a scallop is something that comes from the sea. Call it a scalloped potato, and perhaps I wouldn’t be quite so frustrated. At least Coleman has the nous to call it a ‘potato scallop’ and not simply a ‘scallop’ though, as when those who do begin to refer to actual scallops as ‘sea scallops’ you do have to wonder just where this country went wrong.

CASES RESTED; WHO DO YOU FIND FOR?