BOTANICAL NAME: Solanum tuberosum
FAMILY: Solanaceae
If there is poetry in a name and the poetry of flavor can carry it off, then Beauty of Hebron has both. An avid potato collecting friend of mine once permitted me the delightful challenge of browsing through her tuberarium, a good wine in one hand, a fat notebook in the other. It was like being at a fair where all the exhibits were new; the eye could not take it all in, especially when there were close to two hundred varieties of potato of every imaginable color and shape. Beauty of Hebron, however, did catch my eye. It is a name that is not easily missed or forgotten. But no one knows today exactly how the potato acquired this unusual label—whether it was named for the ancient city of Hebron, the burial place of Abraham and other biblical patriarchs, or whether it alludes to Hebron, New York, a small town near the Vermont border where the developer of Beauty of Hebron maintained some potato fields in the 1870s.
Beauty of Hebron is an American heirloom. Its fame in the nineteenth century was legendary, and its lineage is indeed fascinating. The original variety was released commercially by New York seedsman Peter Henderson in 1878, who bought rights from its developer, Albert Bresee. Bresee’s Beauty of Hebron had smooth skin tinged with rose pink around the eyes. His potato was a seedling of an older dark rose variety called Garnet Chili, developed in 1853 by the Reverend Chauncey E. Goodrich, a Utica, New York, theologian with a well-known penchant for spuds. When potatoes flower, they produce berries that contain seeds that look very much like tomato seeds. When the seeds are planted they create new varieties of potatoes, since they rarely grow true to their parent. Goodrich knew this, and that is how he developed Garnet Chili, which became an instant hit due to its beautiful color and resistance to blight. What Bresee did was take a good thing and create a new generation of classic potatoes from it.
If there is poetry in a name and the poetry of flavor can carry it off, then Beauty of Hebron has both.
Albert Bresee lived in Hubbardton, Vermont, but he did some of his developmental work on potatoes in small communities on both sides of the New York–Vermont border. He was the breeder who created Early Rose, another famous heirloom potato which traces to a seed ball of Garnet Chili in 1861. Luther Burbank used Bresee’s Early Rose to develop his now famous Burbank potato. I mention all of this potato genealogy simply to point out that so many of the heirlooms we grow today are actually closely related “families” or groups that share similar genetic material.
I grow all of the heirloom potatoes just mentioned because I enjoy their fascinating histories and old-fashioned flavor. Although Garnet Chili still stands out for its physical beauty and exquisite taste, Beauty of Hebron pulls out ahead of the rest because it is a large, vigorous potato, tall like All-Red (page 7), and a prolific bloomer with waxy white flowers. It is also quite early; a first crop potato is ready in sixty to eighty days after planting. In my garden it can be dug in early July if planted in March, just in time to avoid the worst of the summer’s heat and humidity. This is an important point, since humid weather often introduces blights that can adversely effect potatoes no matter how blight resistant they are supposed to be.
I also raise both strains of Beauty of Hebron, but it is the more recent white one that I think most people will enjoy growing. For one thing, it is more readily available than the original pink-eyed Beauty of 1878. This white strain is a mutant with yellow-white skin. It became popular in the 1880s under the commercial names Early Puritan and White Hebron. In England it is called Duke of Albany. The tubers are large, weighing anywhere from six to ten ounces. It is best steamed or boiled and makes an excellent potato salad. Best of all it is a heavy yielder.