Potato

An edible tuber, Solanum tuberosum, native to South America. Spanish explorers to South America were the first Europeans to come in contact with the potato in the early 1500s. They brought it back to Spain and from there it eventually spread across Europe. John Hawkins, a seafaring British adventurer, is credited with bringing the first South American potato to England in 1563. However, it was not until after Sir Francis Drake returned with a batch of Chilean potatoes in 1585 that it began its rocky start to eventual widespread popularity. The queen's cook would throw them away and serve only the leaves. The wealthy reviled them as flavorless and only fit for the poor. People distrusted the fact that they reached maturity underground. In Scotland, Presbyterian ministers told parishioners that eating potatoes was blasphemous, because there was no reference to them in the Bible. Yet, by 1650, they had become a staple of the Irish diet, and their cultivation had begun to spread throughout Europe. Irish settlers brought them to the New World.

During the late 1700s in France, a military pharmacist named Antoine-Augustin Parmentier was the first to recognize the potato's merits, but the French would have none of it: since the potato belongs to the nightshade family, it was assumed to be poisonous. Parmentier did manage to win over Louis XVI, who let him grow potatoes at Versailles and allowed them to be pilfered by the Parisian poor. The king started wearing the potato's delicate white flower on his jacket, and Marie Antoinette took to wearing the flowers in her hair. Frederick William III of Prussia (1770-1840), sensing that the potato could boost Prussia's tired economy and feed the poor, issued what has been called "The Brandenburg Potato Paper", an edict ordering farmers to plant potatoes or risk having their ears and nose cut off, which quickly made potatoes a dietary staple.

In the late 1800s in southern Italy and Sicily, potatoes were believed to be inedible and even poisonous: if you wanted to get rid of an enemy, you wrote his name on a piece of paper, fastened it to a potato, buried it, and the enemy would soon join the potato. Europe would wait a long time before the potato gained prominence there. Ireland adopted the potato after the Royal Society of London promoted it as a relief food, primarily because it was a nutritious, rugged and abundant crop, able to provide sustenance for nearly 10 people per acre of land per year, which fueled the population explosion in the early 1800s. Unlike any other food, the potato contains most of the vitamins needed for sustenance. But by mid-century, the Irish had become so dependent upon this crop, that its failure created a famine. The 1840s saw a disastrous potato blight hit not just the British Isles, but Europe as well. The Irish famine cut the population in half, through either emigration or starvation. An effective fungicide was not found until 1883, by the French botanist Alexandre Millardet.

Potatoes can be purple, yellow, golden, pink or orange. Never eat a potato that has germinated or has a green tint to the skin, as this shows an elevated solanine content, which, in large amounts, can be lethal. Baking a potato with the skin will preserve the highest level of nutrients. Boiling a potato without the skin causes a 30 percent nutrient loss; when mashed, the loss can reach 75 percent. A potato stored for more than six months can lose about 50 percent of its vitamin C content. See also fingerling potato, mashed potatoes, new potato.

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