The potato Solanum tuberosum, now a staple food in most parts of the world, has been developed from what were originally an unpromising group of food plants growing at high altitudes in S. America. Vaughan and Geissler (1999) report that remains of wild potatoes dated to about 11,000 bc have been found in the south of Chile, and that there is evidence of cultivation beginning as long ago as 5,000 bc.
These first potatoes had small, misshapen, and knobbly tubers, of many colours, and a bitter taste, but could be rendered edible by techniques which the inhabitants of the region now embracing Bolivia and Peru learned in antiquity. Selection and natural interbreeding combined eventually to produce tubers which would be recognized in modern times as potatoes. Selection continues in modern times, drawing on the very wide range of characteristics which wild potatoes display. Some can be found as high as 3,960 m (13,000′). Some are so resistant to frost that they can grow on, or very near, the snowline. Others grow better in a warmer and drier climate, some of them in a warmer climate than cultivated potatoes can tolerate.
Wild types continue to be eaten. These are known as papas criollas, native potatoes (papa being the general/common Indian name for potato in S. America).
The first Europeans to encounter the potato did so in 1537 in what is now Colombia. They belonged to the Spanish forces of Jiménez de Quesada. On entering a village from which the inhabitants had fled they found maize, beans, and ‘truffles’ which a later account described as ‘of good flavour, a delicacy to the Indians and a dainty dish even for Spaniards’. These ‘truffles’ were potatoes.
The potato was introduced to Spain during the 1550s and it was also grown early in Italy. It was not a success. The potatoes used were small, watery and still rather bitter, and were anyway of a variety which had climatic requirements which could not be met in northern latitudes. Nor could they match the immediate appeal of other newly discovered tubers, for example the Jerusalem artichoke and the sweet potato.
The arrival of the potato in Britain, despite the best efforts of scholars, remains something of a mystery, with tales involving Raleigh and Drake. It is one of those subjects which must either be dealt with in a single paragraph (as here) or be allowed at least 50 pages. However, it is generally accepted that potatoes were introduced to the British Isles (including Ireland) during the 1590s.
Gerard (1633) had grown potatoes in his garden and championed their virtues, though his account is inaccurate and he seems to have muddled them with another American tuber, called openauk. However, except in Ireland, the potato remained in disfavour in Britain. In the north of Ireland (and in Scotland) the Protestants would not plant it, one objection being that it was not mentioned in the Bible. Catholic Irish who had qualms on this account dispelled them by sprinkling their seed potatoes with holy water and planting them on Good Friday. Like many new and expensive foods it had a reputation as an aphrodisiac, in which context it is mentioned by Shakespeare in The Merry Wives of Windsor. It was also said to be poisonous, a common accusation against members of the Solanum genus, which includes deadly nightshade.
Elsewhere in Europe royal or governmental edicts promoted the cause of the potato. In Sweden there was a royal edict in 1764. In Prussia Frederick the Great ordered cultivation on a large scale in Silesia and Pomerania.
Official decree was one thing, genuine popularity another. In 1784 Benjamin Thompson, better known as Count Rumford, the famous American scientist, inventor, soldier, and adventurer, entered the service of the royal Bavarian government to reorganize the workhouse system. The inmates of these ‘Houses of Industry’ were fed as economically as possible on bread and thin gruel. Rumford contrived to make the gruel incredibly cheap by substituting potatoes for the barley which had been used before. Yet, despite the gnawing hunger of the workers, he had to conceal the presence of potatoes by boiling them behind a screen, until they disintegrated unrecognizably, to prevent the inmates from rejecting the gruel.
Other subterfuges were practised, including the one which is supposed to have persuaded the French to esteem the potato by popularizing it at the French court. Parmentier, a French army officer during the Seven Years War, was taken prisoner and kept in detention in Hamburg. There he became used to potatoes, which were part of the prison diet. After his release he brought the French King, Louis XVI, round to his way of thinking, and even persuaded the queen, Marie Antoinette, to wear potato flowers to ornament her dress. The potato became fashionable and part of French cuisine, where to this day dishes containing potato are styled parmentier. More important, he set up a large plantation of potatoes near Paris in order to make the potato more popular with the people. (The field was surrounded by ditches and patrolled by guards. Parmentier instructed the guards to make only a show of vigilance. The curious local peasants, wondering at what could be so valuable, sneaked in at night, stole the potatoes, and planted them in their own gardens.) The popularity of the potato steadily grew from then on. The French Revolution did nothing to stop it; in fact, in 1793 the royal Tuileries gardens were turned into a potato field. Parmentier himself wisely went underground like his vegetables and lived for many more years.
It was in the following century that the Irish, who had come to depend upon the potato almost entirely, suffered a disaster. A fungus disease which had originated in Belgium in the late 1830s spread to Ireland and, aided by the mild, damp climate, totally wiped out the crop during the 1840s. For more about this and its tragic consequences see Ireland and the potato.
Aspects of the early history of the potato, of early perceptions of its nature, and of its wide distribution are evidenced by its many names. These fall into several groups. The original Peruvian Indian name papas has not spread widely except in South America and the Philippines. The name ‘potato’ and ‘patata’ in Spanish stems from the Caribbean Indian name for the sweet potato. Confusingly, the Spanish for the sweet potato is batata and the Italian patata. The potato's resemblance to a truffle is shown in the 16th-century name turma de tierra (earth truffle) and in early Italian names tartufo bianco (white truffle) and taratufflo. This was perverted in German to Kartoffel, which became the Russian kartochki and similar names in several Slavonic languages. The British slang ‘spud’ refers to a potato-digging spade.
Names of the ‘earth apple’ type, formerly used in Europe for other roots, are also widespread, and that name was once used in English. The modern French name pomme de terre, the Dutch aardappel, and obsolete German Erdapfel are among many variants. In Persia the name seb-i-zaminee also means earth apple.
The potato was introduced to India possibly as early as 1615, where it had a slow start but was gradually accepted as a palatable vegetable. Despite its value to a largely vegetarian population, it has still not become a staple food to compare with pulses and rice. It has been even less successful in winning a place for itself in oriental cuisines, although it is of course known throughout the Far East and SE Asia and has achieved local importance in some places, e.g. where the English and Dutch introduced it. (The Dutch, incidentally, had been among those Europeans who took to the potato rather slowly. A remarkable essay by Witteveen (1983) on early potato recipes in the Netherlands charts in detail the slow but steady northward progress of the potato from what is now Belgium to Friesland, at a rate of something like two and a half kilometres a year.)
Generally, in colonies populated largely by white settlers the spread of the potato kept pace with developments in Europe: that is, slowly. Irish immigrants took it to N. America in 1719, for it had failed to spread directly from S. America either among Indian or white colonists. The first plantation was at Londonderry, New Hampshire. In 1770 Captain Cook introduced the potato to Australasia, where it had become common by the middle of the next century.
Potato products are made from potatoes which have been reduced to powder in one of two ways. The first is simple cooking, drying, and grinding, which preserves the solid constituents more or less in their original proportions. This is the method used to make potato flour, a product which has a wide range of uses. Derivatives of potato flour include: instant mashed potato; various frozen potato products; and potato crisps.
Alternatively, the starch may be extracted from potatoes by a washing process. This is the method used to make the very light potato fecula or starch, used as a thickener for delicate dishes.
A specialized process for preserving potatoes in Peru is described under chuño and tunta.
This is a ramified subject since the potato is so versatile and has become almost ubiquitous in the world, thus exposing itself to a wide range of cuisines in all five continents.
Potatoes arouse strong passions, not the sort which the aphrodisiac properties which potatoes have been supposed to have but do not in fact possess, but partisan passions. Some think mashed potatoes with good milk and butter are incomparable, and so they are for certain dishes (bangers and mash). Others claim with justifiable confidence that plain boiled potatoes if done with the skilful techniques of the Irish (drain when cooked, leave to rest a few minutes in the pot with a clean teacloth on top, and shake slightly) are the best of all. Untold and unthinking hordes would assert that chips/frites/french fries have no real competition, although their assertions might falter if they were introduced to the golden-topped butter-and-cream enriched slices which are scalloped potatoes. So-called ‘gourmets’ may think that Parisienne potatoes have no equal (except, possibly, the most delicate croquettes), while Alpine skiers, comparing notes in mountain huts, will give the palm to Swiss rösti. In the few families where a Sunday roast is still served, highest praise would go to mother's roast potatoes, but her offspring might be silently thinking that they prefer jacket potatoes with a dash of yoghurt.
The truth is that all these ways of cooking potatoes produce admirable results, if done properly and for appropriate purposes. Also important, the choice of variety. For the cook, the most important distinction is whether the potato is of the waxy or floury type. Floury potatoes bake well and mash well and are fine for chips, but they disintegrate when boiled. Waxy potatoes remain entire when boiled, but do not mash at all well. In scientific terms, the difference lies in the amount and chemical composition of starch molecules.
Floury potatoes are the most popular in Britain. In continental Europe, waxy potatoes are generally preferred. These do not crumble when boiled, and their particular texture gives the best results in various continental potato dishes (e.g. gratin dauphinois, German or French potato salads). Some varieties, notably what are called Finnish in N. America, have yellow flesh, which is preferred for some purposes.
The same advice (choose an appropriate variety) applies to other dishes in which potatoes figure—omelette, dumplings, pancakes, fritters, rissoles, gnocchi, toppings and fillings for pies, such as shepherd's pie and Cornish pasties (see pasty), and potato pastry.
The nomenclature of potato dishes seems to encourage whimsicality. Besides some of the Irish and Welsh examples, there is a tasty and euphonious dish from Northumberland called Pan haggerty (made from layers of sliced potatoes, onions, and cheese fried in a pan then browned under the grill), and the Scottish Tatties ‘n’ herring made from salted herrings which, once desalted, are steamed sitting atop potatoes as they boil in their jackets. Another Scottish dish is Hairy tatties—prepared with salt cod which is soaked, cooked, flaked finely then beaten into a pot of well-mashed potatoes with butter and black pepper. The flakes break into strands not much thicker than hairs, hence the name (a sort of northern brandade). All of the above have a pleasantly unruly ring.
Aloo makalla, the famous dish of the Baghdadi Jews of Calcutta, sounds sprightly to English ears, although perhaps not in Calcutta; it consists of potatoes which have been boiled briefly and are then fried in oil to cover until golden brown, crisp outside, and meltingly soft inside. Some would also see a whimsical element in the Finnish name Imellettyperunasoselaatikka, which (as Beatrice Ojakangas, 1964, explains) is a traditional potato casserole which is unique in that ‘it undergoes what the Finns call a “malting” process wherein the starch of the potatoes breaks down to form a simpler sugar’, a process which takes them some hours at the side of a large wood stove.
Sweet dishes containing potato are relatively rare, but do exist. Potato apple cake, for example, is a well-established speciality of Northern Ireland. It is composed of two potato cakes, rolled thin and sealed together round a filling of apple slices. The round is then cut into four triangular pieces or farls and cooked on a pan or baked in an oven. Once baked they can be moistened with a sweet buttery sauce. Traditionally baked on a griddle, potato apple cake was a festive Hallowe'en dish.
For some people, when choosing a way of cooking potatoes, it is relevant that advice to eat potatoes with their skins is soundly based. Although the skin itself is not nutritious the layer immediately under it, only millimetres thick, contains most of the potato's vitamin C content. It also holds most of the flavour.
See also: aligote; boil; boxty; bubble and squeak; cawl; champ; chips and crisps; clapshot; cocido; colcannon; fadge; fish and chips; gratin; hash; hotpot; Ireland and the potato; Irish stew; kugel; navarin; pakora; punchnep; stovies.
Alan Davidson was a distinguished author and publisher, and one of the world's best-known writers on fish and fish cookery. In 1975 he retired early from the diplomatic service—after serving in, among other places, Washington, Egypt, Tunisia, and Laos, where he was British Ambassador—to pursue a fruitful second career as a food historian and food writer extraordinaire. Among his popular books are Seafood of South-East Asia, North Atlantic Seafood, and Mediterranean Seafood. In 2003, shortly before his death, he was awarded the Erasmus Prize for his contribution to European culture.
Bareham, Lindsey (1991), In Praise of the Potato, London: Grafton Books.
Gerard, John (1633), The Herbal, New York: Dover.
Ojakangas, Beatrice A. (1964), The Finnish Cookbook, New York: Crown Publishers.
Robyns, Gwen (1980), The Potato Cookbook, London: Pan Books.
Salaman, Redcliffe N. (1949), The History and Social Influence of the Potato, Cambridge: CUP.
Vaughan, J. G., and Geissler, C. A. (1999), The New Oxford Book of Food Plants, Oxford: OUP.
Wilson, Alan (1993), The Story of the Potato through Illustrated Varieties, London: Alan Wilson.
Witteveen, Joop (1983), ‘Potato Recipes in Holland from 1600 until 1850’, in Food in Motion, Oxford Symposium on Food History 1983, Leeds: Prospect Books.
Zuckerman, Larry (2000), The Potato, London: Pan Books.
