How Carrots Won the Trojan War

by Rebecca Rupp

  The original potatoes were small by modern standards — plum- or even peanut-sized. The original growers ate them with llama, guinea pig, squash, and beans or, closer to sea level, tomatoes, peppers, and avocadoes. Ancient Andean potato cuisine was dominated, however, by chuño, an unappetizing form of processed potato made by freezing, thawing, and stamping repeatedly on the unfortunate tubers until they were reduced to a blackened, desiccated mass. This preparation had to be reconstituted with water before eating and thus was a sort of primeval instant mashed potatoes. Like its instant descendant, chuño was noted for its superb keeping qualities.

  The first Europeans to encounter potatoes were the Spaniards in the early sixteenth century, when Francisco Pizarro and company — out after gold and emeralds — stumbled upon them near Quito, Ecuador. One of their company, Pedro Cieza de Leon, who apparently joined the expedition at the tender age of fourteen, is sometimes credited with the first description of the potato, in his 1553 history of his experiences, The Chronicle of the Incas, or the Seventeen-Year Travel of Pedro Cieza de Leon Throughout the Mighty Kingdom of Peru. The potato, Cieza de Leon writes, is one of the principal foods of the Indians, along with maize: “a kind of earth nut which, after it is boiled, is as tender as cooked chestnuts.”

  Alternatively the first to get the potato into print was Juan de Castellanos, who saw some in 1537 and described them somewhat condescendingly as “white and purple and yellow, floury roots of good flavor, a delicacy to the Indians and a dainty dish even for Spaniards.” He said they were the size of an egg and referred to them as truffles.

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  The One That Makes the New Bride Weep

  The Peruvians immortalized their potatoes in pottery: archaeologists have unearthed potato-shaped funeral urns, potato-decorated cooking pots, and, for junior potato eaters, potato-shaped whistles. The Quechuas, the indigenous people of South America, amassed over one thousand different names for potatoes, linguistic evidence of the crop’s immense regional importance. Varietal names, based on size, shape, and behavior, included “cow’s-tongue,” “guinea-pig fetus,” “red cucumber,” and “the one that makes the new bride weep,” a potato notoriously difficult to peel.

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  The English, despite much loose talk about the “Virginia” potato, acquired theirs from Cartagena, Colombia, where Sir Francis Drake, after a profitable season of picking off Spanish treasure ships in the Caribbean, paused to lay in supplies for the long sea voyage home. His potato-stocked vessel then stopped off in Virginia to collect a handful of hungry and discouraged colonists from Roanoke Island, a colony financed, but never visited by, Walter Raleigh. All returned to Mother England in 1586. (A second round of colonists had worse luck, vanishing in naggingly mysterious fashion, leaving behind only a baby’s shoe and the word Croatan carved on a tree trunk.)

  Samples of Drake’s Colombian potatoes were passed on to Raleigh, who reportedly planted them at Youghal in County Cork, his estate in Ireland, and to herbalist John Gerard, who never quite sorted out where they came from. Gerard thought them “mighty and nourishing,” especially if their regrettable tendency toward “windinesse” was eliminated by eating them sopped in wine. By the 1633 edition of his Great Herball, potatoes rated a whole chapter of their own, titled “Of Potato’s of Virginia.” The “Virginia” potatoes were designated Common, or Bastard, Potatoes, presumably to distinguish them from the genuine article, the sweet potato.

  The common potato, scientifically Solanum tuberosum, belongs to the family Solanaceae, along with the tomato and the eggplant. Of the 2,000 or so species in the bulging genus Solanum, about 170 are tuber bearers, and of the tuber bearers, only eight are routinely cultivated and eaten by people. Most of these have stuck pretty much close to home in the Andes of Peru; only S. tuberosum has attained fame worldwide. Perversely, it has done so under a misnomer: our word potato derives from a completely unrelated plant, the Caribbean batata, or sweet potato.

  The sweet potato was discovered by Columbus on his second trip to the New World and sent back to Spain in 1494 along with a number of unhappy Indians, sixty parrots, and three gold nuggets. Taxonomically, the sweet potato, Ipomoea batata, belongs to Convolvulaceae, the Morning Glory or Bindweed family. The scientific name comes from the Greek ips (“worm”) and homoios (“like”), since Carolus Linnaeus — the eighteenth-century Swedish botanist, famed for his system of plant classification — thought the twining vines looked unpleasantly like worms.

  Beneath these wormish vines, the roots accumulate stored food and swell to form sweet potatoes. (The sweet potato, no matter what American Southerners may call it, is not a yam. The yam belongs to the family Dioscoreaceae and comes from Africa.) Unlike the sweet potato, the common potato, for all its suggestive underground location, is not a root vegetable, but a tuber, the outgrowth of an underground stem, or stolon. With both potatoes, however, the result is the same: if you want to eat them, you have to dig them up.

  The question of how the sweet potato made it to Easter Island, New Zealand, and Hawaii is a mystery worthy of The X-Files.

  Sweet potatoes were referred to in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature as “Spanish potatoes,” an indication of who in Europe planted them first, though John Gerard, still struggling with potato geography, called them “Skyrrets of Peru.” He planted some in his garden, where they died as soon as it got cold. They did well, however, in the steamy American South: Robert Beverley, in his History and Present State of Virginia (1705), described them with uncomfortable imagery as “about as long as a Boy’s Leg, and sometimes as long and big as both the Leg and Thigh of a young Child, and very much resembling it in Shape. I take these Kinds to be the same with those, which are represented in the Herbals, to be Spanish Potatoes.” He thought they were native to Virginia, which they weren’t.

  Neither are they native to Polynesia, where archaeological research shows they were growing by 1000 CE, a good 500 years before Europeans made it to the Pacific. In the potato world, the question of how the sweet potato made it to Easter Island, New Zealand, and Hawaii is a mystery worthy of The X-Files. Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian ethnographer and ocean adventurer, was chasing sweet potatoes when he crossed the Pacific from Peru on a balsa-wood raft, the Kon-Tiki, in 1947. His theory was that Polynesia was first settled by seafaring South Americans.

  An equal and directionally opposing theory holds that the early Polynesians traveled to South America by canoe and collected sweet potatoes while there, and another not particularly well-received long shot suggests that early Chinese traders, after touching down in California and South America, dropped potatoes off in Polynesia on their way home. Or sweet potatoes may have managed the voyage on their own: some evidence suggests that drifting seed capsules could have survived in salt water long enough to wash up intact on a Polynesian beach.

  In Europe, sweet potatoes were considered delicacies through the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, on a par with such exotic goodies as oranges and dates. They were particular favorites of Henry VIII, and in quantity, judging by his hefty later portraits. Henry preferred his potatoes baked in pies, and a surviving Tudor era recipe describes a pie filling of mashed sweet potatoes combined with quinces, dates, egg yolks, the brains of three or four cock sparrows, sugar, rose water, spices, and a quart of wine. The sweet potato was considered an aphrodisiac as well as a taste treat: when Shakespeare’s Falstaff shouts “Let the sky rain potatoes!” in The Merry Wives of Windsor, he was hoping for Ipomoea batata.

  The common potato might have had better luck if English cooks had stuck to pie cuisine. However, it seems that they didn’t, and the upsetting result did little for the potato’s popular reputation. Sir Walter Raleigh, the story goes, gallantly made a gift of potatoes grown in his Irish garden to Queen Elizabeth I. The queen’s cooks, uneducated in the matter of potatoes, tossed out the lumpy-looking tubers and brought to the royal table a dish of boiled stems and leaves, which made all who ate them deathly ill. Potatoes, un
derstandably, were banned from court and it was some centuries before they managed to wholly live down their toxic public image.

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  Forbidden Fruit

  Presbyterian ministers in Scotland forbade potato eating on the grounds that nobody mentioned potatoes in the Bible. Some even suggested that the potato may have been the Forbidden Fruit that caused all the trouble in the Garden of Eden, which leaves us with an appealing vision of Eve and the snake grubbing about with a spade.

  Rickets, scrofula, leprosy, tuberculosis, and syphilis were variously blamed on potatoes. William Cobbett, the potato-hating British journalist, blamed them for sloth. In the late nineteenth century, Reverend Richard Sewall accused them of leading to wantonness in housewives, since their preparation required so little time and effort that female hands were left idle and primed to do the Devil’s work.

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  The culprits in the royal banquet disaster were the poisonous potato alkaloids solanine and chaconine, manufactured by the plant to fend off insect pests. These are present in highest quantity in the stems and leaves, which ordinarily people don’t eat. Tiny amounts are also present in the tubers where, under normal circumstances, they contribute harmlessly and positively to the potato’s overall taste. Under certain conditions, however, they can accumulate to the point of toxicity. Alkaloid production in tubers is turned on by exposure to light or to extremely cold or hot storage temperatures. Luckily for the unwary, light also stimulates the production of chlorophyll, which means that dangerous tubers are green.

  The Dutch introduced the potato to Japan in the early seventeenth century, where it was relegated to use as cattle fodder until Commodore Perry talked the Emperor into trying a few in 1854. Peter the Great acquired potatoes on a visit to Holland in 1697 and brought them home to Russia as a treat for imperial banquets; in the next century, his ungrateful peasants spurned them as “the Devil’s apples.” Apprentices in colonial America refused to eat them, claiming that potato-eating might shorten their lives, and as late as the mid-nineteenth century, many thought potatoes fit only for livestock. A contemporary Farmer’s Manual suggested they be planted near the hog pens, the better for convenient feeding.

  Despite the fact that the Germans have the distinction of publishing the first known potato recipes, in Ein neu Kochbuch (1581), printed on the august press of Johannes Gutenberg, potato acceptance by the average German was not without a struggle either. Potatoes became a staple in Germany only at the insistence of the Emperor Frederick II (the Great), who, after a series of disastrous Prussian crop failures, distributed free seed potatoes throughout his realm. The ungrateful recipients wanted nothing to do with them, complaining that the potatoes had no taste or smell (“not even dogs will eat them”), at which point the fed-up Frederick thundered that anyone refusing to plant his potatoes would have his or her nose and ears cut off. An alternative story holds that he won over the recalcitrant by publicly eating potatoes on the balcony of the imperial palace.

  Whether due to carrot or stick, by the 1750s the Prussian potato fields were well enough established to feed the populace during the lean years of the Seven Years’ War; and two decades later the crop was so substantial that by 1778, when Frederick plunged Prussia into the War of the Bavarian Succession, the conflict was nicknamed Kartoffelkrieg — the Potato War — since the opposing forces spent so much time raiding each other’s potato fields.

  One beneficiary of Frederick’s potatoes was Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, a young French soldier who had spent a good part of the Seven Years’ War in a Prussian prison, being fed exclusively on Frederick’s potatoes. He emerged a champion of the potato, convinced that the nutritious tubers — to date neglected in France — had unplumbed possibilities. In 1771 he finally got a chance to present his potato to the public. In that year, following a severe crop failure, the Academy of Besançon offered a cash prize to whoever could come up with the best “study of food substances capable of reducing the calamities of famine.” Parmentier won hands down with his comprehensive “Inquiry into Nourishing Vegetables That in Times of Necessity Could Be Substituted for Ordinary Food.” Foremost among his proposed Nourishing Vegetables was the potato, weakly followed by the acorn, the horse chestnut, and the roots of irises and gladioli.

  Even with Academy backup, the potato did not immediately leap to prominence, and Parmentier was to spend the next decades promoting his chosen vegetable. The problem almost certainly was misplaced emphasis, since he appears to have spent less time touting the potato as a vegetable, baked, boiled, mashed, or fried, than as a source of potato starch to be used as a substitute for wheat flour in baking. This never worked very well, though Voltaire experimented with it and managed to turn out “a very savorous bread.” Annoyingly, from Parmentier’s point of view, the only real popularity of potato starch seems to have been as a wig whitener.

  Success came on the King’s thirty-first birthday, August 23, 1785, when Parmentier foxily presented Louis XVI with a complimentary bouquet of potato flowers. The King tucked a flower in his lapel, Marie Antoinette stuck one in her coiffeur, and the potato, socially, was made. During his time in the royal sun, Parmentier supervised the preparation of a totally tuberous banquet, featuring some twenty potato dishes, from potato soup to postprandial potato liqueur, at which polymath Benjamin Franklin and chemist Antoine Lavoisier were said to have been among the guests.

  By the end of the century, the potato was established in France as a useful and reputable field crop. By then Parmentier’s name was so synonymous with potato that a move was made to rename the tuber parmentière in his honor, which never got off the ground. Instead he is preserved for posterity in potage Parmentier, potato soup.

  There are few references to potatoes in the early days of the American colonies. Among them, Irish potatoes are said to have been served as a “rare delicacy” at a Harvard dinner celebrating the installation of a new president in 1707, although they seem to have played second fiddle to the brandy, beer, Madeira, and wine. Most sources agree, however, that the first credible record of colonial potatoes dates to 1719, when a patch was planted near Londonderry (now Derry), New Hampshire, by a newly arrived batch of Scotch-Irish settlers. The New Hampshire potato flourished and soon spread to adjacent settlements, reaching Connecticut in 1720 and Rhode Island in 1735.

  “Had Irish potatoes from the garden,” Thomas Jefferson records in his Garden Book on July 31, 1772. Still, the eighteenth-century potato was often viewed as something you ate only when everything else was exhausted. Potato consumption increased during the lean years of the Revolutionary War, and John Adams, who viewed this as a hardship, wrote in a bolstering patriotic letter home to Abigail: “Let us eat potatoes and drink water . . . rather than submit.” She responded feistily that they could probably do as well on whortleberries and cow’s milk.

  By the end of the eighteenth century, however, the potato was a popular staple. Amelia Simmons, in American Cookery (1796), is upbeat about potatoes, writing that they supersede all other vegetables for “universal use, profit, and easy acquirement.” She lists five varieties, of which the best, according to Amelia, is the smooth-skinned How’s Potato (“most mealy and richest flavor’d”), followed by the yellow rusticoat (rusty-coated), the red, the red rusticoat, and the yellow Spanish. She recommends that potatoes be served roasted with “Beef, a Steake, a Chop, or Fricassee,” and includes a dessert recipe for a sweet Potato Pudding that calls for a pound of mashed potatoes, a pound of sugar, cream, lemon, and nutmeg.

  Named potato cultivars first began to appear in the mid-1700s; before that, varieties were vaguely differentiated on the basis of color and shape. Thomas Jefferson planted “round” potatoes, and contemporary lists of potato types allude vaguely to round, long, flat, rough, smooth, red, yellow, pink, purple, and kidney-shaped varieties. Bernard M’Mahon’s 1806 American Gardener’s Calendar mentions only one variety of potato in his list of sixty-seven “Esculent Vegetables”; by midcentury at least one hundred
varieties were available, among them English Whites and Biscuits (both round), the La Plata (a long red), the purple-fleshed Chenango, and the Pennsylvania Blue.

  Whatever one’s personal opinion of the potato, almost everyone agreed that it was a good idea to feed them to somebody else. Filling and cheap, potatoes were an obvious solution to the perennial food problems of the poor, the army, the jails, the orphanages, and the insane asylums. The Royal Society of London, which had established a committee devoted to potatoes by 1662, advocated them as a famine relief crop. In 1664, John Forster, Gent., plugged potatoes in his long-windedly titled magnum opus, Englands Happiness Increased, or a Sure and Easie Remedie against all succeeding Dear Years; by a Plantation of the Roots called Potatoes . . . Invented and Published for the Good of the Poorer Sort. Seventeenth-century agriculturalist Arthur Young — a pen pal of George Washington — deemed the potato a “root of plenty” and wrote excitedly “Vive la pomme de Terre!”

  Nutritionally, they were right: the potato is a dietary gold mine. One medium-sized tuber contains 3 grams of protein, 2.7 grams of dietary fiber, and 23 grams of carbohydrate. Each potato also contains about half the adult Recommended Daily Allowance of vitamin C — the Spaniards used potatoes as anti-scorbutics on board the treasure galleons; and in Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast (1834), the debilitated and scurvy-ridden crew is saved by encountering a brig provisioned with onions and potatoes. One man, “lying helpless and almost hopeless in his berth,” was so revived by raw potatoes that in no time he was once again “at the mast-head, furling a royal.”

  Efficient and easy to grow, potatoes are usually propagated using “seed potatoes” — chunks of parent potato containing an “eye.” This is actually a cluster of minuscule buds from which stems and roots will sprout once the potato is planted. Potatoes produced in this fashion are clones, all genetically identical to their parent plant.