Food for Fort: On salted capers and cooking fresh-dug potatoes

These days I can only find capers in vinegar. Are salted capers still made and, if so, where? Capers in vinegar are no match for salted ones (except in skate with black butter, where their acidity is a fine foil for the weight of butter), which you can get at any Italian deli worth its, ahem, salt. Or Waitrose, which has an own-brand version at £1.95 for 100g . Failing that, go online: weetons.com has Spanish ones at £2.15, melburyandappleton.co.uk sells two types, or try Nife Is Life (£7 for 500g) or Natoora (£3.25 for 100g). How long after digging potatoes should I wait before boiling them? I had some Sharpe's Express that had been dug days earlier, and needed an extra one, so I dug it up, put it in with the others and it fell apart way before the others were cooked. After a long conversation with AJ Jina of the Potato Council , it seems there may be no simple answer. Water content, dry matter, starch grains, water depth and temperature all have a part to play. Jina says a few days shouldn't make much difference, but in my experience a spud just out of the ground cooks far more quickly than one dug a few days before. My theory is that "new'" potatoes are juveniles, full of moisture and sugar. When cooked, the cells swell and, as the water reaches boiling point, the cell walls break down and, lo, you get a disintegrated potato. As potatoes age after digging, the sugars turn to starches, so they lose some moisture and don't fall apart so easily. • Got a culinary query for Matthew? Email [email protected] Follow Matthew on Twitter and read his blog, Fort on Food .