Do not be down-hearted, but cheer up once more,
The provision is coming from each foreign shore,
Good beer, flour and butter, rich sugar and tea,
From Russia and Prussia and Amerikay.
Old Irish rhyme
Potatoes were first cultivated thousands of miles from Ireland. An indigenous product of South America, they were grown – many thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans – by the ancient Incas, who lived in the high Andes mountains. They used to preserve them in the frosty nights and the hot tropical sun by freeze-drying them into a form called chuno. The cold climate and damp atmosphere of their original home around Lake Titicaca was ideally matched to that of Ireland, which is why potatoes took so well to the Irish conditions. For some reason, the early Spanish naturalists who first came across the potato cross-pollinated its name with that of the Caribbean sweet potato, or batatas, hence the word ‘potato’.
Some historians suggest that it was the naval admiral and first slave-trader Sir John Hawkins who first introduced the potato to England in 1563. It was reputedly Sir Walter Raleigh who first brought them to Ireland from his colony in Virginia, USA, in the 1580s. Raleigh was appointed Mayor of Youghal in County Cork until he fell out of favour with Queen Elizabeth I. On her death in 1603, he was imprisoned in the Tower of London by King James I, and beheaded by the axe, which he ruefully called ‘a sharp medicine, but an infallible cure!’.
Sir Walter Raleigh met the famous poet Edmund Spenser (1552–99) at Castle Matrix in County Limerick in 1580, and presented him with his New World tubers. Spenser went on to cultivate the first potatoes in Ireland. Raleigh also gave some potatoes to Lord Southwell, who became the first person to devise the open-field method of cultivation in Ireland. The annual Walter Raleigh Potato Festival is still held in Youghal.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the potato became the staple diet in Ireland, as under British rule the wealth of Irish dairy produce and cereals were reserved for export to England. Also, potatoes were easy to grow in Ireland’s rich soil and therefore soon dominated the local vegetable plots. In the early days, potatoes were cooked in a special, usually three-legged, iron pot over a turf fire, and they were then drained in a wicker basket. In England, on the other hand, it took the bad northern European grain harvests of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to force people to accept the potato as a regular part of the diet.
Even as early as the first famines of the early 1740s, Edmund Burke wrote, ‘Whoever travels through this kingdom will see such poverty as few nations in Europe can equal.’ By the early nineteenth century, half of Ireland’s peasantry had forsaken traditional cultivation. The forced subdivision of a farmer’s smallholding amongst his surviving sons under the conacre system meant that a living had to be eked out from less than an acre of land. As the potato thrived throughout the island, even those areas with poor soil, it was rapidly adopted as the crop of choice. Indeed, many poor people ate nothing else. By 1845, the rapidly growing Irish population numbered eight million people. When a blight struck the potato crops for three years in a row, therefore, the results were disastrous. During the Great Famine of 1845–7, millions of Irish people emigrated to North America to escape starvation, while over 250,000 people died in 1847 alone.
There are several hundred varieties of potatoes grown throughout the world, and the white Irish variety of potatoes known as Solanum tuberosum are said to be among the sweetest and fluffiest anywhere. Arguably the best new potatoes in Ireland are the Comer variety from County Down. The versatility of the potato, whether new or old, gave rise to a wealth of imaginative ways of cooking with potatoes. With protein, vitamins, minerals and fibre, little fat or salt and plenty of easily assimilated starch, they are among the most nutritious of foods.