Potatoes

Potato comes from the Spanish name, patata. Since the Spanish encountered the potato when they met the Incas, you’d think they’d have just taken their name for it. Unfortunately for the Spanish the Inca word was papa, which is what they call the Pope! You wouldn’t want to talk about peeling, boiling and mashing the head of the Catholic Church for dinner, so they took a cue from the word from a Caribbean language for sweet potato, batata. For quite some time it was actually sweet potatoes that were called ‘potatoes’ in English, with regular potatoes being called white potatoes, Irish potatoes or Virginia potatoes. This makes more sense considering that back then potatoes were a lot more knobbly.

Potatoes are also called spuds, a name dating back at least 150 years. A story has spread around that this came from an anti-potato group called S.P.U.D., the ‘Society for the Prevention of an Unwholesome Diet’, but there’s no evidence such a campaign ever existed. Instead ‘spud’ probably just came from the spade used to dig holes when planting potatoes, with the holes themselves first being called ‘spuds’.

Potatoes become green when they’re exposed to light. This green colour is connected to an increase in the level of solanine in the potato, a naturally occurring poison. This poison will make the potato taste bitter and possibly dangerous to eat, although severe solanine poisoning is very rare.

If a potato has only just started turning green, it may be safe to eat when peeled because the solanine is concentrated under the skin, to the depth of about 3mm. The poison itself isn’t green, unfortunately, and does spread throughout the potato, so just cutting the green bits off doesn’t work after a point. The safest advice is to not eat potatoes that have gone green under the skin.

The small, or with enough time, very big, sprouts that come out of potatoes are called ‘eyes’. Because a potato is a tuber, it’s possible to grow another potato plant from it, and that’s what the eyes are trying to do. Because these eyes use the potato for food to grow they can degrade the potato very quickly. If your potatoes have eyes, you should eat them within a day or two and cut away the affected areas.

Why are my potatoes sweet, or turning grey or black when cooked?

If your potatoes are turning grey or black with cooking, they’ve probably been exposed to too low of a temperature. Below 5°C the starch in the potato starts being converted into sugar, which causes an unusual sweet taste and the strange colour. A similar effect can also happen above 10°C.

Potatoes are 80% water, so if they’re kept in too dry of an environment they can dry out and shrink, causing the skin to become wrinkled. While potatoes need a certain level of humidity to stay in good condition, they shouldn’t be allowed to become wet, or else they’ll get soggy and rotten.

From the single variety of potato grown in the Andes thousands of years ago farmers, breeders and scientists have managed to produce hundreds of different varieties. Selective breeding and crossbreeding are the most popular methods, with genetic modification being very rare.

Selective breeding is the process of identifying individuals with desirable qualities and breeding them together to make the next generation possess more of those qualities. New varieties today are usually produced by crossbreeding, where two varieties are bred together to produce a potato with the best of both. Breeding with wild varieties is particularly useful for making potatoes resistant to certain diseases or thrive in different environments.

The small amount of varieties produced by genetic modification take fragments of DNA from other potatoes, plants or even insects, and insert it into the DNA of a potato. This has been done to produce varieties resistant to disease, bruising or to make them more useful for industrial purposes.

The potato comes from the Americas. Genetic research found that every potato in the world descends from potatoes cultivated 7,000-10,000 years ago in Peru. This makes it one of the oldest crops in the world.

Potatoes were brought to Britain, and the rest of Europe, in the 1500s through the Columbian Exchange between Europe and the Americas. The Inca Empire relied on potatoes as a staple food, and they introduced them to the Spanish conquistadores. The Incas cooked potatoes by boiling them, mashing them and putting them in stews. They also had a unique method of preserving potatoes. The Incas would leave them out to freeze on cold nights before thawing in the morning, to dry them out. After a few goes the potatoes would be laid out and stamped on, squeezing out the remaining water and removing the skin. These dried potatoes shrank a lot and had a much longer shelf-life, making them perfect for times of food shortage or for warriors on the march.

The first mention of potatoes in Europe is a delivery receipt to Antwerp in 1567, but they wouldn’t become the staple food we know today for about two hundred years. There’s a lot of strange or conflicting stories about the potato in this time. One story tells of how the potato was introduced to Ireland by Portuguese fishermen, another that they washed ashore from a Spanish shipwreck. Sir Francis Drake, or an employee of Sir Walter Raleigh, are sometimes credited with bringing the potato to England in 1586 or 1588, but there’s not much evidence to go on. Despite this, an impressive statue in a small town in Germany is dedicated to Drake and his introduction of the potato to Europe, which is not only something he definitely didn’t do but also only ended up there because the sculptor couldn’t find anyone else to buy it!

When potatoes were first introduced, Europeans were really not sure what to do with them. One of the earliest scientific descriptions of the vegetable came from the man in charge of the Austrian Emperor’s flower and herb garden. It’s thought potatoes made their way across Europe as gifts between the aristocracy who thought they were curiosities with possible medicinal uses. There are also quite a few stories of these aristocrats deciding to host dinners with this exotic vegetable. Their chefs decided to throw away the ugly tubers and cook the green plant itself, which is both very bitter and poisonous enough to cause an upset stomach. The guests probably put on a polite smile as they forced it down, but it seems like the story got around that the potato was a horrible, poisonous plant.

Anti-potato sentiment was so strong for a time that they were called ‘Devil’s apples’ and were even banned in parts of France in the 1700s. That ban only ended when a soldier captured by the Prussians, Parmentier, came home and told everyone that he’d been made to live on a diet of potatoes while in prison. In Russia the Tsar tried to help starving peasants by sending them carts of potatoes, and they had to be forced to accept them at gunpoint!

This prejudice eventually died down, leading to an explosion in the popularity of the potato from the late 18th to 19th Century. Potatoes are much more efficient than cereals like oats, wheat and barley, requiring less land, less water and less processing. The increased productivity from adopting the potato even contributed to the population boom that powered the Industrial Revolution.

The seasonality of potatoes depends on what variety is being grown. The first potato of the season is the Jersey Royal, which come into season in March or April and are around to August. Large potatoes like the Maris Piper are usually harvested from July to September and then stored over winter.