It’s hard to imagine a time when the humble potato wasn’t one of the most famous vegetables on the planet.
From gnocchi to cepelinai, tudou si to French fries, the potato is the original global citizen, the “world’s most successful immigrant“, with different varieties and colours to suit every palate.
They can be roasted, baked, braised, boiled, smashed, scalloped, stewed, sauteed or simply fried. Spuds can be added to salads, soups or stews, served as a side dish or planted back in the ground to repopulate.
It’s this versatility that makes them a household staple. But hundreds of years ago, most Europeans had never heard of the vegetable.
“[Back then] if you were encountering a potato, you might think that it was a very, very strange food indeed. It was unlike anything that you’d probably ever seen before,” Lauren Samuelsson, food historian and associate lecturer at the University of Wollongong, tells ABC Radio National’s No One Saw It Coming.No One Saw It Coming
And those who were familiar with the plant were wary of eating it.
“Some clergymen were preaching that because the potato hadn’t appeared in the Bible, it was not designed for human consumption by God,” says Dr Samuelsson.
Then came Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, a prisoner-of-war turned unofficial PR agent for the potato.
The young man was introduced to spuds while imprisoned behind enemy lines in Prussia, and he lived on little else for several years. Having developed a taste for this prison food, he made it his mission, once released, to revamp the image of the South American vegetable in broader Europe.
With the help of Parmentier’s “lavish ‘potato parties”, the vegetable underwent a makeover to become the staple food we know today.
Europe’s distaste for potatoes
The Spanish first observed potatoes when they arrived in South America in 1532 to conquer the Incan Empire.
Spuds were domesticated around 8,000 to 12,000 years ago in the Andes region of Peru and north-west Bolivia. The ancestors of today’s cultivated potato can still be found growing wild there.
The Spanish invaders eventually introduced the tubers to Europe, along with other crops including tomatoes and corn.
The pursuit of empire brought potatoes into contact with other parts of the world, and they ended up being the fuel that kept those empires going.
“[It] was the food of the [Spanish Empire’s] enslaved workforce. And that, of course, then allowed the Spanish to build up untold riches and really fuel their imperial ambitions around the world,” says Dr Samuelsson.
But the arrival of potatoes from the New World to the Old World was initially greeted with scepticism.
The foreign vegetable, with its knobbly, misshapen design and textured skin, reminded folks of leprosy-infected limbs and stoked fears that the potato was a physical manifestation of the contagious disease.
Dr Samuelsson explains this was because the prevailing medical opinion at the time posited that whatever caused or cured a disease “often looked like the disease that it was causing [or curing]”.Stream your favourite shows on the free ABC listen app
People also thought potatoes might be poisonous due to its links to the nightshade family, to the extent that the French parliament even banned the tuber in 1748.
Another problem was that the wildly different climate conditions between Europe and South America did not suit early Andean varieties of the vegetable.
It took decades for the potato to adapt to the shorter European growing season, though it had better luck growing in Ireland.
“At the very beginning, it would have only been the very poorest of people who were eating potatoes,” says Dr Samuelsson.
Bread remained the staple food across Europe in the 18th century, but that soon changed thanks to rising prices, a revolution and a potato ‘influencer’.
French royalty at a potato party
Antoine-Augustin Parmentier was a pharmacist in the French army when he was captured by Prussians and held as a prisoner of war in the mid-1700s.
His diet consisted largely of potato mash for the three years he was detained. At the time, Prussians were encouraged to plant and eat potatoes in the belief that if they were ever invaded, they could live off a vegetable buried underground.
After his release, Parmentier became the potato’s biggest advocate.
A large part of his obsession with the vegetable seemed to be rooted in his own good health after years of eating only one food. Parmentier’s hypothesis was that the potato must hold nutritional value.
In 1770, he wrote a prize-winning essay, titled Inquiry into Nourishing Vegetables That in Times of Necessity Could Be Substituted for Ordinary Food, which argued in favour of using potatoes as an alternative to bread.
Its release coincided with rising prices and food shortages in France, which had in turn fuelled unrest and anger in towns and villages up and down the country.
“France and lots of European countries [were] one bad year away from famine because they [were] so reliant on wheat as their staple crop,” says Dr Samuelsson.
But in order for the potato to be fully embraced by society, Parmentier needed to get the elite on board.
And the best way to do that was by throwing extravagant dinners.
“On the advice of Benjamin Franklin, the American statesman who was over in France as an ambassador, [Parmentier] started to throw these potato parties where he would invite all of his mates,” says Dr Samuelsson.
Parmentier was well-connected to the French elite and used the gatherings to introduce the arbiters of cultural taste to various potato delicacies, from soup to dessert and “even potato vodka”.
Yet the ultimate tick of approval lay with the French king and queen, Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette.
“The story goes that Parmentier, in one of his amazing potato parties, somehow swings it that the king and queen [came] to one of these events,” says Dr Samuelsson.
“When they got there, he presented them with a bouquet of potato flowers, and apparently they were so enchanted, they loved it so much that [King] Louis put potato flowers in his lapel. And Marie Antoinette decorated her hair with potato flowers.”
From banned vegetable to a viable substitute for bread, the potato’s evolution continued until it made its way into some the world’s most famous dishes.
Fried potatoes arrive in America
When one of America’s founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, arrived in Paris to serve as ambassador to the French court, the potato frenzy was in full swing.
“While he was over there, he was obviously hobnobbing with the great and the good. And he almost certainly could have been at one of Parmentier’s parties,” says Dr Samuelsson.
Jefferson developed a taste for the local cuisine, encouraging his enslaved chef James Hemings to learn to cook French food. Hemings reportedly collected over 150 recipes that he took back to America.
One of those recipes was on how to make “pommes de terre frites a cru en petites tranches” or deep-fried potatoes in small cuttings.
“Deep frying was becoming a real art in France … and so you can connect the dots here that someone’s decided to find out what happens if you put potatoes in boiling hot oil,” says Dr Samuelsson.
While it’s debated whether Jefferson was the first to introduce French fries to the US, his notes contain perhaps the earliest American reference to them.
It took more than a century for French fries to be fully embraced in America, and debate still rages over the origins of the fried potato: Belgium claims the recipe belongs to them, while others argue it’s a Spanish dish.
In Ireland, however, the tuber has a very different reputation.
Too much of a good thing
Potatoes are perhaps best remembered now for bringing about one of the worst famines in history.
Centuries ago, Irish peasants became reliant on the tuber after a wave of British imperial expansion deprived them of valuable land needed to farm grains and livestock and forced them into areas where fewer foods could be cultivated.
Potatoes, peasants discovered, were one of the few plants that flourished in those less arable areas.
“The Irish started to really rely on potatoes and it became the main part of their diet. Irish workers … would eat anywhere between 10 to 12 pounds of potatoes a day, which is four to six kilos,” says Dr Samuelsson.
But that all changed in 1845, when a fungus-like pathogen, Phytophtora infestans, also known as a blight, infected potato crops and made them inedible.
Without their primary source of food, the Irish starved. In decades, the population halved.
“When you become too reliant on one thing, it’s a recipe for disaster,” says Dr Samuelsson.
Potato blight and famine are still a risk in many corners of the globe to this day. But it hasn’t stopped the potato’s dizzying rise in the culinary space.
Today, it is the world’s third-most important crop after rice and wheat, and is consumed by more than one billion people.
“There’s not really a cuisine around the world that doesn’t use potatoes and hasn’t incorporated it into their food cultures, which I think just shows how wonderfully versatile it is,” says Dr Samuelsson.
“But it definitely still has a colonial legacy to it.”
By Lucia Stein, Marc Fennell and Taryn Priadko for No One Saw It Coming
