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A Victorian Dr. Spock, Weeping
Peruvian Brides, Rafting to Polynesia,
Marie Antoinette’s Coiffeur,
The Reverend Berkeley’s Microscope,
and A Weapon of Mass Destruction
What I say is that if a fellow really likes potatoes, he must be a pretty decent sort of fellow.
A. A. MILNE
Pye Henry Chavasse, the Dr. Spock of the Victorian era, was a fan of potatoes. In his 1844 bestseller, Advice to a Mother on the Management of Her Children, he avers that “old potatoes, well cooked and mealy” are the best vegetable a child can possibly eat — provided they were very well mashed, since lumps, warns Chavasse, have been known to send the young into convulsions. He was doubtful about the benefits of greens, though reluctantly permitted an occasional serving of asparagus, broccoli, cauliflower, or turnip, and he absolutely forbade onions and garlic.
Thanks to Chavasse, students at Eton were fed nothing but mutton and potatoes for lunch and dinner all three hundred and sixty-five days of the year, the dietary monotony only alleviated by plum pudding on Sundays, a bequest of Lord Godolphin in 1785. Charles Dickens wrote that “the inmates of a workhouse or gaol were better fed and lodged than the scholars of Eton.”
The unfortunate Etonians were not alone in their distaste for potatoes. Eighteenth-century French Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot, chief editor of the famous Encyclopédie (which eventually ran to thirty-five volumes, published from 1751 to 1772), stated sourly that the potato “cannot pass for an agreeable food.” No matter how one prepared it, the result was “tasteless and floury,” although it just might possibly have “some value in the colonies,” where presumably people were hungry enough to eat it. French naturalist Raoul Combs in 1749 pronounced it “the worst of all vegetables,” and William Cobbett, English farmer, journalist, and social activist, who called it “the villanous root,” simply loathed it. Even drinking the water in which potatoes were boiled, according to Cobbett, could induce irreversible moral damage; and he bemoaned the fact that Sir Walter Raleigh was not beheaded earlier, before he had had the chance to introduce the British to the insidious potato.
Actually, the potato may not have been Sir Walter’s fault. Potatoes were domesticated about 10,000 years ago in the Andes of Peru by high-altitude-dwelling ancestors of the Incas. To the original planters, the potato must have been a godsend, since not much else grows readily in the Andean high sierra. While corn wimpishly peters out around 11,000 feet, potatoes proliferate undaunted up to 15,000, which means, should you be so inclined, you could establish a productive potato patch halfway up Mount Everest.
The original potatoes were small by modern standards — plum- or even peanut-sized. The original growers ate them with llama, guinea pig, squash, and beans or, closer to sea level, tomatoes, peppers, and avocadoes. Ancient Andean potato cuisine was dominated, however, by chuño, an unappetizing form of processed potato made by freezing, thawing, and stamping repeatedly on the unfortunate tubers until they were reduced to a blackened, desiccated mass. This preparation had to be reconstituted with water before eating and thus was a sort of primeval instant mashed potatoes. Like its instant descendant, chuño was noted for its superb keeping qualities.
The first Europeans to encounter potatoes were the Spaniards in the early sixteenth century, when Francisco Pizarro and company — out after gold and emeralds — stumbled upon them near Quito, Ecuador. One of their company, Pedro Cieza de Leon, who apparently joined the expedition at the tender age of fourteen, is sometimes credited with the first description of the potato, in his 1553 history of his experiences, The Chronicle of the Incas, or the Seventeen-Year Travel of Pedro Cieza de Leon Throughout the Mighty Kingdom of Peru. The potato, Cieza de Leon writes, is one of the principal foods of the Indians, along with maize: “a kind of earth nut which, after it is boiled, is as tender as cooked chestnuts.”
Alternatively the first to get the potato into print was Juan de Castellanos, who saw some in 1537 and described them somewhat condescendingly as “white and purple and yellow, floury roots of good flavor, a delicacy to the Indians and a dainty dish even for Spaniards.” He said they were the size of an egg and referred to them as truffles.
The One That Makes the New Bride Weep
The Peruvians immortalized their potatoes in pottery: archaeologists have unearthed potato-shaped funeral urns, potato-decorated cooking pots, and, for junior potato eaters, potato-shaped whistles. The Quechuas, the indigenous people of South America, amassed over one thousand different names for potatoes, linguistic evidence of the crop’s immense regional importance. Varietal names, based on size, shape, and behavior, included “cow’s-tongue,” “guinea-pig fetus,” “red cucumber,” and “the one that makes the new bride weep,” a potato notoriously difficult to peel.
The English, despite much loose talk about the “Virginia” potato, acquired theirs from Cartagena, Colombia, where Sir Francis Drake, after a profitable season of picking off Spanish treasure ships in the Caribbean, paused to lay in supplies for the long sea voyage home. His potato-stocked vessel then stopped off in Virginia to collect a handful of hungry and discouraged colonists from Roanoke Island, a colony financed, but never visited by, Walter Raleigh. All returned to Mother England in 1586. (A second round of colonists had worse luck, vanishing in naggingly mysterious fashion, leaving behind only a baby’s shoe and the word Croatan carved on a tree trunk.)
Samples of Drake’s Colombian potatoes were passed on to Raleigh, who reportedly planted them at Youghal in County Cork, his estate in Ireland, and to herbalist John Gerard, who never quite sorted out where they came from. Gerard thought them “mighty and nourishing,” especially if their regrettable tendency toward “windinesse” was eliminated by eating them sopped in wine. By the 1633 edition of his Great Herball, potatoes rated a whole chapter of their own, titled “Of Potato’s of Virginia.” The “Virginia” potatoes were designated Common, or Bastard, Potatoes, presumably to distinguish them from the genuine article, the sweet potato.
The common potato, scientifically Solanum tuberosum, belongs to the family Solanaceae, along with the tomato and the eggplant. Of the 2,000 or so species in the bulging genus Solanum, about 170 are tuber bearers, and of the tuber bearers, only eight are routinely cultivated and eaten by people. Most of these have stuck pretty much close to home in the Andes of Peru; only S. tuberosum has attained fame worldwide. Perversely, it has done so under a misnomer: our word potato derives from a completely unrelated plant, the Caribbean batata, or sweet potato.
The sweet potato was discovered by Columbus on his second trip to the New World and sent back to Spain in 1494 along with a number of unhappy Indians, sixty parrots, and three gold nuggets. Taxonomically, the sweet potato, Ipomoea batata, belongs to Convolvulaceae, the Morning Glory or Bindweed family. The scientific name comes from the Greek ips (“worm”) and homoios (“like”), since Carolus Linnaeus — the eighteenth-century Swedish botanist, famed for his system of plant classification — thought the twining vines looked unpleasantly like worms.
Beneath these wormish vines, the roots accumulate stored food and swell to form sweet potatoes. (The sweet potato, no matter what American Southerners may call it, is not a yam. The yam belongs to the family Dioscoreaceae and comes from Africa.) Unlike the sweet potato, the common potato, for all its suggestive underground location, is not a root vegetable, but a tuber, the outgrowth of an underground stem, or stolon. With both potatoes, however, the result is the same: if you want to eat them, you have to dig them up.
The question of how the sweet potato made it to Easter Island, New Zealand, and Hawaii is a mystery worthy of The X-Files.
Sweet potatoes were referred to in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature as “Spanish potatoes,” an indication of who in Europe planted them first, though John Gerard, still struggling with potato geography, called them “Skyrrets of Peru.” He planted some in his garden, where they died as soon as it got cold. They did well, however, in the steamy American South: Robert Beverley, in his History and Present State of Virginia (1705), described them with uncomfortable imagery as “about as long as a Boy’s Leg, and sometimes as long and big as both the Leg and Thigh of a young Child, and very much resembling it in Shape. I take these Kinds to be the same with those, which are represented in the Herbals, to be Spanish Potatoes.” He thought they were native to Virginia, which they weren’t.
Neither are they native to Polynesia, where archaeological research shows they were growing by 1000 CE, a good 500 years before Europeans made it to the Pacific. In the potato world, the question of how the sweet potato made it to Easter Island, New Zealand, and Hawaii is a mystery worthy of The X-Files. Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian ethnographer and ocean adventurer, was chasing sweet potatoes when he crossed the Pacific from Peru on a balsa-wood raft, the Kon-Tiki, in 1947. His theory was that Polynesia was first settled by seafaring South Americans.
An equal and directionally opposing theory holds that the early Polynesians traveled to South America by canoe and collected sweet potatoes while there, and another not particularly well-received long shot suggests that early Chinese traders, after touching down in California and South America, dropped potatoes off in Polynesia on their way home. Or sweet potatoes may have managed the voyage on their own: some evidence suggests that drifting seed capsules could have survived in salt water long enough to wash up intact on a Polynesian beach.
In Europe, sweet potatoes were considered delicacies through the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, on a par with such exotic goodies as oranges and dates. They were particular favorites of Henry VIII, and in quantity, judging by his hefty later portraits. Henry preferred his potatoes baked in pies, and a surviving Tudor era recipe describes a pie filling of mashed sweet potatoes combined with quinces, dates, egg yolks, the brains of three or four cock sparrows, sugar, rose water, spices, and a quart of wine. The sweet potato was considered an aphrodisiac as well as a taste treat: when Shakespeare’s Falstaff shouts “Let the sky rain potatoes!” in The Merry Wives of Windsor, he was hoping for Ipomoea batata.
The common potato might have had better luck if English cooks had stuck to pie cuisine. However, it seems that they didn’t, and the upsetting result did little for the potato’s popular reputation. Sir Walter Raleigh, the story goes, gallantly made a gift of potatoes grown in his Irish garden to Queen Elizabeth I. The queen’s cooks, uneducated in the matter of potatoes, tossed out the lumpy-looking tubers and brought to the royal table a dish of boiled stems and leaves, which made all who ate them deathly ill. Potatoes, understandably, were banned from court and it was some centuries before they managed to wholly live down their toxic public image.
Presbyterian ministers in Scotland forbade potato eating on the grounds that nobody mentioned potatoes in the Bible. Some even suggested that the potato may have been the Forbidden Fruit that caused all the trouble in the Garden of Eden, which leaves us with an appealing vision of Eve and the snake grubbing about with a spade.
Rickets, scrofula, leprosy, tuberculosis, and syphilis were variously blamed on potatoes. William Cobbett, the potato-hating British journalist, blamed them for sloth. In the late nineteenth century, Reverend Richard Sewall accused them of leading to wantonness in housewives, since their preparation required so little time and effort that female hands were left idle and primed to do the Devil’s work.
The culprits in the royal banquet disaster were the poisonous potato alkaloids solanine and chaconine, manufactured by the plant to fend off insect pests. These are present in highest quantity in the stems and leaves, which ordinarily people don’t eat. Tiny amounts are also present in the tubers where, under normal circumstances, they contribute harmlessly and positively to the potato’s overall taste. Under certain conditions, however, they can accumulate to the point of toxicity. Alkaloid production in tubers is turned on by exposure to light or to extremely cold or hot storage temperatures. Luckily for the unwary, light also stimulates the production of chlorophyll, which means that dangerous tubers are green.
The Dutch introduced the potato to Japan in the early seventeenth century, where it was relegated to use as cattle fodder until Commodore Perry talked the Emperor into trying a few in 1854. Peter the Great acquired potatoes on a visit to Holland in 1697 and brought them home to Russia as a treat for imperial banquets; in the next century, his ungrateful peasants spurned them as “the Devil’s apples.” Apprentices in colonial America refused to eat them, claiming that potato-eating might shorten their lives, and as late as the mid-nineteenth century, many thought potatoes fit only for livestock. A contemporary Farmer’s Manual suggested they be planted near the hog pens, the better for convenient feeding.
Despite the fact that the Germans have the distinction of publishing the first known potato recipes, in Ein neu Kochbuch (1581), printed on the august press of Johannes Gutenberg, potato acceptance by the average German was not without a struggle either. Potatoes became a staple in Germany only at the insistence of the Emperor Frederick II (the Great), who, after a series of disastrous Prussian crop failures, distributed free seed potatoes throughout his realm. The ungrateful recipients wanted nothing to do with them, complaining that the potatoes had no taste or smell (“not even dogs will eat them”), at which point the fed-up Frederick thundered that anyone refusing to plant his potatoes would have his or her nose and ears cut off. An alternative story holds that he won over the recalcitrant by publicly eating potatoes on the balcony of the imperial palace.
Whether due to carrot or stick, by the 1750s the Prussian potato fields were well enough established to feed the populace during the lean years of the Seven Years’ War; and two decades later the crop was so substantial that by 1778, when Frederick plunged Prussia into the War of the Bavarian Succession, the conflict was nicknamed Kartoffelkrieg — the Potato War — since the opposing forces spent so much time raiding each other’s potato fields.
One beneficiary of Frederick’s potatoes was Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, a young French soldier who had spent a good part of the Seven Years’ War in a Prussian prison, being fed exclusively on Frederick’s potatoes. He emerged a champion of the potato, convinced that the nutritious tubers — to date neglected in France — had unplumbed possibilities. In 1771 he finally got a chance to present his potato to the public. In that year, following a severe crop failure, the Academy of Besançon offered a cash prize to whoever could come up with the best “study of food substances capable of reducing the calamities of famine.” Parmentier won hands down with his comprehensive “Inquiry into Nourishing Vegetables That in Times of Necessity Could Be Substituted for Ordinary Food.” Foremost among his proposed Nourishing Vegetables was the potato, weakly followed by the acorn, the horse chestnut, and the roots of irises and gladioli.
Even with Academy backup, the potato did not immediately leap to prominence, and Parmentier was to spend the next decades promoting his chosen vegetable. The problem almost certainly was misplaced emphasis, since he appears to have spent less time touting the potato as a vegetable, baked, boiled, mashed, or fried, than as a source of potato starch to be used as a substitute for wheat flour in baking. This never worked very well, though Voltaire experimented with it and managed to turn out “a very savorous bread.” Annoyingly, from Parmentier’s point of view, the only real popularity of potato starch seems to have been as a wig whitener.
Success came on the King’s thirty-first birthday, August 23, 1785, when Parmentier foxily presented Louis XVI with a complimentary bouquet of potato flowers. The King tucked a flower in his lapel, Marie Antoinette stuck one in her coiffeur, and the potato, socially, was made. During his time in the royal sun, Parmentier supervised the preparation of a totally tuberous banquet, featuring some twenty potato dishes, from potato soup to postprandial potato liqueur, at which polymath Benjamin Franklin and chemist Antoine Lavoisier were said to have been among the guests.
By the end of the century, the potato was established in France as a useful and reputable field crop. By then Parmentier’s name was so synonymous with potato that a move was made to rename the tuber parmentière in his honor, which never got off the ground. Instead he is preserved for posterity in potage Parmentier, potato soup.
There are few references to potatoes in the early days of the American colonies. Among them, Irish potatoes are said to have been served as a “rare delicacy” at a Harvard dinner celebrating the installation of a new president in 1707, although they seem to have played second fiddle to the brandy, beer, Madeira, and wine. Most sources agree, however, that the first credible record of colonial potatoes dates to 1719, when a patch was planted near Londonderry (now Derry), New Hampshire, by a newly arrived batch of Scotch-Irish settlers. The New Hampshire potato flourished and soon spread to adjacent settlements, reaching Connecticut in 1720 and Rhode Island in 1735.
“Had Irish potatoes from the garden,” Thomas Jefferson records in his Garden Book on July 31, 1772. Still, the eighteenth-century potato was often viewed as something you ate only when everything else was exhausted. Potato consumption increased during the lean years of the Revolutionary War, and John Adams, who viewed this as a hardship, wrote in a bolstering patriotic letter home to Abigail: “Let us eat potatoes and drink water . . . rather than submit.” She responded feistily that they could probably do as well on whortleberries and cow’s milk.
By the end of the eighteenth century, however, the potato was a popular staple. Amelia Simmons, in American Cookery (1796), is upbeat about potatoes, writing that they supersede all other vegetables for “universal use, profit, and easy acquirement.” She lists five varieties, of which the best, according to Amelia, is the smooth-skinned How’s Potato (“most mealy and richest flavor’d”), followed by the yellow rusticoat (rusty-coated), the red, the red rusticoat, and the yellow Spanish. She recommends that potatoes be served roasted with “Beef, a Steake, a Chop, or Fricassee,” and includes a dessert recipe for a sweet Potato Pudding that calls for a pound of mashed potatoes, a pound of sugar, cream, lemon, and nutmeg.
Named potato cultivars first began to appear in the mid-1700s; before that, varieties were vaguely differentiated on the basis of color and shape. Thomas Jefferson planted “round” potatoes, and contemporary lists of potato types allude vaguely to round, long, flat, rough, smooth, red, yellow, pink, purple, and kidney-shaped varieties. Bernard M’Mahon’s 1806 American Gardener’s Calendar mentions only one variety of potato in his list of sixty-seven “Esculent Vegetables”; by midcentury at least one hundred varieties were available, among them English Whites and Biscuits (both round), the La Plata (a long red), the purple-fleshed Chenango, and the Pennsylvania Blue.
Whatever one’s personal opinion of the potato, almost everyone agreed that it was a good idea to feed them to somebody else. Filling and cheap, potatoes were an obvious solution to the perennial food problems of the poor, the army, the jails, the orphanages, and the insane asylums. The Royal Society of London, which had established a committee devoted to potatoes by 1662, advocated them as a famine relief crop. In 1664, John Forster, Gent., plugged potatoes in his long-windedly titled magnum opus, Englands Happiness Increased, or a Sure and Easie Remedie against all succeeding Dear Years; by a Plantation of the Roots called Potatoes . . . Invented and Published for the Good of the Poorer Sort. Seventeenth-century agriculturalist Arthur Young — a pen pal of George Washington — deemed the potato a “root of plenty” and wrote excitedly “Vive la pomme de Terre!”
Nutritionally, they were right: the potato is a dietary gold mine. One medium-sized tuber contains 3 grams of protein, 2.7 grams of dietary fiber, and 23 grams of carbohydrate. Each potato also contains about half the adult Recommended Daily Allowance of vitamin C — the Spaniards used potatoes as anti-scorbutics on board the treasure galleons; and in Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast (1834), the debilitated and scurvy-ridden crew is saved by encountering a brig provisioned with onions and potatoes. One man, “lying helpless and almost hopeless in his berth,” was so revived by raw potatoes that in no time he was once again “at the mast-head, furling a royal.”
Efficient and easy to grow, potatoes are usually propagated using “seed potatoes” — chunks of parent potato containing an “eye.” This is actually a cluster of minuscule buds from which stems and roots will sprout once the potato is planted. Potatoes produced in this fashion are clones, all genetically identical to their parent plant.
“One man, “lying helpless and almost hopeless in his berth,” was so revived by raw potatoes that in no time he was once again “at the mast-head, furling a royal.”
Potatoes do make seeds, which are contained in the potato berry, a small green tomatolike fruit that usually gets tossed unappreciatively on the compost heap. The seeds are tiny. There are perhaps fifty thousand in an ounce, enough to plant an acre’s worth of potatoes, as opposed to a bulky sixteen hundred pounds of seed potatoes. Potato seed is also relatively disease-free compared to the tubers, which are notorious carriers of viruses, and it’s solely through potato seed that genetic diversity is introduced into the largely uniform national potato crop.
Such diversity is a two-sided coin: since potato seed is a genetically mixed bag, developing potato varieties that breed true is no Sunday picnic. Most potatoes are tetraploid — containing quadruple sets of twelve chromosomes each — and such complex hybrids are difficult to sort out in even the most dedicated laboratory.
Seed potatoes, as in pieces of tuber, on the other hand, are reproducible, faster-growing, and produce more infant potatoes. In general, potatoes generate four times the calories contained in an identical area of land planted in grain. A mere acre’s worth can feed a family of six for a year. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the nutritious and comparatively effortless potato ignited a pan-European baby boom. The unprecedented availability of food caused populations to double and double again. The Industrial Revolution was largely fueled by potatoes, which provided a wave of well-fed workers for factories, soldiers for armies, and immigrants for colonies overseas. A lot of us are around these days because of an influential potato in our pasts.
Nowhere were the benefits of the potato more obvious than in Ireland. By the early 1800s, the Irish had been living off potatoes — and pretty much nothing but potatoes — for over two hundred years. Potatoes first reached Ireland, according to one story, in barrels washed ashore from the wreck of the Armada. Others credit Sir Walter Raleigh, and according to historian William McNeill, the most likely source was visiting Basque fishermen, who originally got their potatoes from Spain. In any case, by the early 1700s, nourished by potatoes, the population of Ireland had doubled to 2 million; by 1800, it had reached 5 million; and, by 1843, 8.5 million.
Outside observers were of two minds about the prolific potato and its prolific effects. The fiery William Cobbett — who wrote that “the Irish people are brave, generous, hospitable, laborious, and full of genius” — fumed that the “ever-damned potato” had reduced them to the “state of hogs, and worse than that of hogs . . . poor, ragged, half-naked creatures” living in mud huts and burning peat. Sir Walter Scott, on the other hand, touring Ireland in 1825, remarked on the gaiety and lightheartedness of the peasants, who were fond of fiddling and dancing, and were always willing to share their simple bowls of potatoes with passing tourists. Arthur Young, visiting in the late 1770s, praised the fine physiques of the Irish men and the good looks of the women.
Cobbett’s assessment of the potato proved closest to the truth. Dependence on a single subsistence crop is a recipe for disaster, and nowhere has this proved more tragically true than in Ireland. Potato crop failure and famine had struck Ireland at least twenty-four times between 1728 and 1845, the kick-off year of what we now know as the Great Hunger, but never before were the results so devastating. The Irish Potato Famine of the late 1840s has been cited as Europe’s worst disaster since the passage of the Black Death in 1348-50. A million and a half Irish died, and a million and a half more fled overseas. Ireland, in one fell swoop, lost over a quarter of its population.
By the 1840s, the bulk of Irish fields were planted with a single variety of potato, a large, ugly, but notably fertile tuber descriptively known as the Lumper. In August of 1845, when the potato harvest began, the tubers, to universal horror, were found to have turned to black slime in the ground. The potato failure was not just an Irish but a global catastrophe — potatoes disintegrated worldwide across Europe and America, from the Andes to the Himalayas — but the Irish, wholly dependent upon potatoes, were by far the worst afflicted.
By the 1840s, the bulk of Irish fields were planted with a single variety of potato, a large, ugly, but notably fertile tuber descriptively known as the Lumper.
“Rotten potatoes have done it all!” raged the conservative Duke of Wellington.
Left to cope with the Irish situation was British Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, nicknamed “Orange Peel” for his notorious nonsupport of the Irish. (Irish activist Daniel O’Connell once described him as having a chilly smile “like the silver plate on a coffin.”) Actually he seems to have been a pleasant man in private life, with an adoring wife, seven children, and a massive manor in Staffordshire known for its magnificent gardens and flock of peacocks. Today he is best remembered for founding the Metropolitan Police, still known, in Sir Robert’s honor, as bobbies.
To his credit, the chilly Sir Robert did his best, attempting to alleviate the catastrophic situation in Ireland by importing half a million dollars’ worth of Indian corn from the United States. To do so he was forced to put his political reputation on the line. The purchase of food for Ireland necessitated the repeal of the disputed Corn Laws — tariffs that since the turn of century had restricted the import of foreign cereal grains. The Corn Laws had been a bone of vicious contention for decades: rich landowners, who supported them, wanted to ban cheap imported grain that might reduce their incomes; hopeful industrialists, who opposed them, argued that cheaper grain prices would drive down the price of food, thus freeing up more income for consumers to spend on manufactured goods.
The potato, by self-destructing, tipped the balance, forcing the British government, confronted with an island of starving Irish, to give way. The demise of the Corn Laws changed the political face of England and paved the way for a range of liberal reforms. “Rotten potatoes have done it all!” raged the conservative Duke of Wellington. Peel, in the wake of the potatoes, resigned his post as prime minister and never held government office again.
In the short term, cheap imported American corn did no good. The Irish, who had no mills and thus lacked the means to process, cook, or eat it, referred to the British offering as “Peel’s brimstone,” and continued to starve. Visitors to Ireland described a land in ruins: land untilled, cottages empty, the people “famished and ghastly,” “tattered skeletons.”
For many, the better part of valor was to flee: in the wake of the famine, over a million Irish immigrants came to the United States. Despite awful past experience, they brought with them their predilection for potatoes, which in their adopted country were soon nicknamed mickeys or murphys in honor of their prime consumers. The Irish and their potatoes were so closely linked in the popular mind that by the latter half of the nineteenth century the predominantly Irish Boston police were known as the Blue Potatoes.
The 1846–48 potato failures were blamed on everything from steam locomotives to volcanic eruptions, gases from the newly invented sulfur matches, an elusive “aerial taint” from outer space, wet weather, and (from Charles Trevelyan, director of Britain’s famine relief program) God’s will. From whatever source, the blight was seemingly inexorable. Botanist John Lindley, editor of the Gardener’s Chronicle, wrote despairingly “As to cure for this distemper — there is none.” Queen Victoria called for a national day of prayer.
The evil genius behind the Great Hunger was eventually run to earth by a handful of amateur mycologists scattered across Belgium, France, and England — most effectively by an unprepossessing country clergyman, the Reverend Miles Joseph Berkeley of King’s Cliffe in Northamptonshire, who, since his college days, had had a passion for fungi. When the blight appeared in the potato fields of King’s Cliffe, the Reverend (“a tall well-built man of singularly noble appearance”) rushed samples to his microscope and emerged with an illustrated 35-page report declaring the perpetrator of the blight to be a fungus.
Eventually designated Phytophthora infestans (the genus name means “plant destroyer”), the fatal fungus usually infects the plant leaves first, then spores wash into the soil to infiltrate and destroy the underground tubers. So rapid and devastating is the result that in the past the United States, the Soviet Union, and Germany have all conducted research on P. infestans as a possible biological weapon.
In Event of Disaster
The Irish Potato Famine led to a frenzy of potato breeding and diversification, to the point where potato cultivars now number in the thousands. The International Potato Center in Peru — home of the ancestral potato — has a collection of 5,500, plus a stash of 1,500 samples of germplasm from 100 wild species. The theory is that if potato disaster strikes again, we can eventually recover. E. O. Wilson said, “We should preserve every scrap of biodiversity while we learn to use it and come to understand what it means to humanity.”
The catastrophic passage of Phytophthora infestans had a substantial impact on the types of potatoes grown, and breeders were egged on by such incentives as the offering of a ten-thousand-dollar prize from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to the person to discover “a sure and practical remedy for the Potato Rot.” The best of the proposed remedies was a new potato known as the Garnet Chili, developed in 1853 by Reverend Chauncey Goodrich of Utica, New York, from a wild South American variety.
From the Garnet Chili, Albert Bresee of Hubbardton, Vermont, produced the Early Rose, an introduction of the 1860s that rapidly became America’s top potato. The Early Rose gave way in the 1870s to the Burbank potato, developed in 1873 by twenty-three-year-old Luther Burbank from a seedball stumbled across in his mother’s Massachusetts garden. Burbank sold his landmark potato for $150 to nurseryman J. J. H. Gregory and used the proceeds to move to California. There he settled down in Santa Rosa and went on to create a white blackberry, a stoneless cherry, and a spineless cactus, plus a grand total of seventy-eight new fruits, nine new vegetables, eight new nuts, and several hundred new varieties of ornamentals, including the Shasta daisy. His potato is the ancestor of the Russet Burbank, the potato that made Idaho famous.
P. infestans, however, is still around. The killer mold — which can also doom tomatoes — still wipes out crops to the tune of over $6 billion a year worldwide. The reason, according to the international team of scientists who mapped the P. infestans genome in 2009, is the fungus’s enormous and versatile complement of DNA. P. infestans has over twice as much DNA as its feebler and less invasive relatives, and it appears to be able to juggle its genes to adapt rapidly to varying conditions. With a little genetic adjustment, it evades chemical pesticides and demonstrates an uncanny persistence in overcoming the defense mechanisms of resistant potatoes.
Scientists continue to produce fungus-fighting potatoes. Best known in the United States is the defiantly named Defender potato, which came on the market in 2004, offspring of a cultivar called Ranger Russet and a blight-resistant Polish potato. Most recently geneticists at the Agricultural Research Service in Madison, Wisconsin, are attempting to cross cultivated potatoes with Solanum verrucosum, a highly blight-resistant wild potato species, and potatoes genetically engineered for blight resistance are being tested in Ireland, where a new and meaner strain of P. infestans popped up in 2009.
By the early twentieth century, potato varieties numbered in the thousands. The seed house of Vilmorin-Andrieux, announcing despairingly that “the number of the varieties of the Potato is prodigious,” listed a mere 135, including 31 French varieties, 18 German, 19 American (including the Jumbo White Elephant), and 25 English, among them the quintessentially British Rector of Woodstock and Vicar of Laleham.
Production of potatoes today tops 325 million tons a year, putting the potato fourth on the list of the world’s staple crops, behind wheat, rice, and maize. China is the world’s top potato producer, turning out about a quarter of the total crop, most of which goes into vodka or livestock feed. Next in line are Russia, India, and the United States. (Ireland no longer even makes it into the top ten.) The U.S. accounts for about 20 million tons of potatoes a year, the lion’s share from Idaho, whose modest state license plate reads “Famous Potatoes.”
Jefferson encountered “French” fried potatoes in Paris while American ambassador to France in the 1780s and become fond enough of them to offer fries to guests at Monticello.
When George Lerner invented the Mr. Potato Head toy in the late 1940s, it consisted of an assortment of plastic features — eyes, nose, mouth, ears, and a wardrobe of silly little hats — intended to be jabbed into a real potato. Toy manufacturers didn’t think much of it; the industry buzz was that the public would hate the frivolous waste of perfectly good food.
Nevertheless, a tiny Rhode Island business named Hasbro, Inc. consented to take it on. It was a brilliant call on Hasbro’s part. In 1952, the year Mr. Potato Head hit the toy stores, he earned the company $4 million. He also had the distinction of being the first toy ever to be advertised on the then brand-new television.
By 1953, in a spirit of potato gender equality, Mrs. Potato Head came on the market, followed by a pair of Potato Head offspring, Spud and Yam. A plastic potato was substituted for the genuine vegetable in 1964.
Americans eat about 117 pounds of potatoes a year, which averages out to about a potato a day apiece. About a third of these are fresh potatoes; the rest are processed, that is, frozen, dehydrated, French-fried, or chipped. Processing results in unavoidable vitamin loss, but that doesn’t seem to hold American consumers back any. In this country, five billion pounds of potatoes a year go to make French fries.
We owe French fries to the Francophilic Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson encountered “French” fried potatoes in Paris while serving as American ambassador to France in the 1780s and become fond enough of them to offer fries to guests at Monticello once he returned home. The recipe “To fry Sliced Potatoes” that appears in Mary Randolph’s Virginia Housewife (1824) is most likely Jefferson’s, possibly by way of his French chef at the President’s House in Philadelphia, Etienne Lemaire.
Despite this elite introduction, French fries didn’t catch the public fancy until the 1870s and weren’t really common until the twentieth century. They were known quite formally as “French fried potatoes” until the 1920s, when the name was shortened to “French frieds”; then a decade later it was truncated even further to the now-familiar “French fries.” Most French fries today are Russet Burbanks, vaguely rectangular potatoes eminently suitable for dissection into squared-off strips.
In Great Britain, French fries are known as chips, as in “fish and chips,” while potato chips are known as crisps, presumably because they are. Like ice-cream cones, Hula-Hoops, and Frisbees, potato chips are an American invention. The story goes that they first came to light in the late 1800s at the Moon’s Lake House in Saratoga Springs, a then-fashionable upstate New York spa. The chef, an American Indian named George Crum, ran afoul of a cantankerous customer — embellished versions claim it was Cornelius Vanderbilt — who kept sending his fried potatoes back to the kitchen, complaining that they were too thick. Driven to the wall, Crum finally sliced his potatoes paper-thin and served up the fried result. The crispy potatoes were a wild success, and for years afterward, dubbed “Saratoga chips,” were a specialty of the Moon’s Lake House, stuffed into paper cornucopias made by the owner’s wife.
No Small Potatoes
The term “small potatoes” — meaning insignificant things or people — has been an insult since 1831. It’s a terrible misnomer. Potatoes are productive, nutritious, and easy to grow. Over the last few decades, potato consumption has steadily increased in Asia, Africa, and Latin America — which means that potatoes are now providing food for a lot of previously empty tables. There’s nothing small about potatoes.
Dehydrated potatoes date at least to the Civil War, when they were included — along with salt pork and hardtack — in the unappetizing rations of the Army of the Potomac.
Dehydrated potatoes date at least to the Civil War, when they were included — along with salt pork and hardtack — in the unappetizing rations of the Army of the Potomac. They first made it big, however, in World War II, when they were mercilessly fed to the U.S. troops. Civilians voluntarily ate 12 pounds apiece of these in 2009. Instant-potato proponents claim nutritional advantages, citing the average 20 percent nutritional loss that results from the amateur peeling of fresh potatoes in the home or institutional kitchen. That’s easy to do, since one-third of the potato’s nutrients are squeezed into a thin band called the cortex, located just beneath the peel. (It shows up as a darker border around the rim of potato chips.)
Instant potatoes are also said to be cheaper than genuine mashed potatoes. My personal feeling, however, is that potatoes should not have the consistency of Cream of Wheat, and that the best use of dehydrated potatoes is by the assorted filmmakers who have used the flakes in Christmas movies to imitate snow.
Even more inedible is the Amflora potato, a genetically modified spud designed for purely industrial use. The ordinary potato contains about 25 grams of carbohydrate per medium-sized tuber, most of it in the form of starch. The quickie test for starch, as you might remember from Biology 101, is to dunk the questionable material in iodine; if it turns black, it’s starch. Perhaps the most creative use of the starch test in history was that of master criminal John Dillinger, who carved a pistol out of a potato, stained it with iodine, and used it to escape from jail. (To be fair, an alternative story claims he whittled the pistol from a piece of a wooden washboard and painted it with shoe polish.)
Starch is a complex carbohydrate, consisting of long chains of linked sugar molecules, which may be branched and bushy, forming amylopectin, or long and linear, making amylose. Potatoes contain both, usually in a ratio of about 4:1. In a potato-eating dietary sense, both are good: diets high in complex carbohydrates reduce the risks of heart disease and colon cancer. For industrial purposes, the preferred starch by far is amylopectin — and to reduce the prohibitive cost of separating desirable amylopectin from not-so-desirable amylose, the German Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology came up with the all-amylopectin Amflora potato.
Potato starch is big business. Today it’s a major component of paper, construction materials, adhesives, packing chips, emulsifiers for soups and gravies, and biodegradable plastics, which in turn are used for everything from picnic forks to golf tees. Potato starch was used as the adhesive on the backs of the first lickable postage stamps — the famous “penny black,” bearing the profile of 15-year-old Princess (not yet Queen) Victoria, was pasted onto postcards with potatoes — and Autochrome, a photography process devised by Auguste and Louis Lumière in 1903, used potato-starch-coated glass plates to produce early color photographs.
Marilyn Monroe once posed in a potato sack, looking delectable and doubtless giving new meaning to the term hot potato, which since the 1920s has meant a spectacular girl. For those lucky enough to have one, the National Potato Promotion Board, based in Denver, Colorado, has decreed that February is National Potato Lover’s Month, nicely timed to overlap with Valentine’s Day.
If you’d really like to make points, there’s a potato cultivar called Diamond, and another called Red Rose.