on the sidejojo potatoes

A potato wedge that has been breaded, pressure-fried and spiced — not a bare wedge, and not a fry. The pressure fryer is a pressure cooker filled with hot oil, so the potato cooks fast and hard while keeping its water. Sold beside fried chicken across the Pacific Northwest, and in pockets of Montana, Minnesota, Nebraska, Northeast Ohio and upstate New York.

Willamette Week ran down the origin in 2017 and found two accounts. Paul Nicewonger says his father, a Vancouver, Washington salesman, invented the jojo around 1958, demonstrating pressure fryers at a restaurant trade show next to Idaho potato vendors — he needed something cheap and quick to throw in the oil. Ron Echtenkamp of Ballantyne Strong credits Ed Nelson, a Flavor-Crisp salesman, with making them by accident at a Chicago trade show in 1961. The paper did not settle it.

The machine carried the food. Flavor-Crisp, Henny Penny and the Broaster Company of Beloit, Wisconsin built the pressure fryers, and "broasting" became the trade word for what came out of them. Because the fryers were sold region by region, each region came to believe it had invented the jojo.

Inference — the jojo is a salesman's demo that outlived the sales route, which is why its map looks like a distributor's territory rather than a cuisine.

Cut a potato into thick wedges with the skin on. Bread and season them, then pressure-fry. The lid holds steam over the oil, which raises the boiling point inside the fryer and cooks the wedge through before its crust burns. Out of the basket they go beside fried chicken, and in the same shops that sell chicken they take the same sauce the chicken takes.

Grocery-store delis and chicken counters across Oregon and Washington still sell them by the half-dozen. Tradition holds — a shop that calls them wedges is selling something else, and a shop that calls them jojos is usually running a pressure fryer.