Poor Farmers’ Blight— The Irish Potato

As Irish legend tells the tale, the wreck of a Spanish ship carried the first round of potatoes to Ireland where these veggie immigrants from South America floated ashore, salt-washed and ready to eat. Quite likely, rumors arrived too, warning folks to be wary of this thin-skinned but dastardly member of the deadly nightshade family. With such infamous cousins as red tomatoes and green peppers, the Solanum tuberosum purportedly produced a poison able to induce everything from stomach upset to syphilis, leprosy, and sterility! Early French references to potatoes as pomme de terre or earth apples may have contributed connotations to this garden variety of rumor too, so the strange vegetable was thought to cause the eternal ruination of the gardens in which they grew. With such a wicked reputation spreading wildly, officials in France and other areas issued edicts strictly forbidding potato production.

Although Spanish Conquistadors often spoke of the wholesome benefits potato eyes had seen, few vegetable visionaries believed in the nutritious value of this odd glob of a tuber. As noted in mid-to-late 16th century journals, sailors who ate potatoes did not encounter scurvy during long trips at sea. On land, the potato or papa, as it was initially known in the Quechuan language of the ancient Incans, had amply fed pre-Columbian peoples for many thousands of years. Indeed, the papa plant originated in the Andes or highland regions of South America now known as Peru. By the late 1500s, however, Spaniards had taken the papa or patata, as they dubbed the spud, to North America where another name change occurred as “Potatoes of the Virginia,” further confusing botanical histories.
Meanwhile back at sea, those legendary ships from the Spanish Armada actually did sink off the Irish coast in 1588. So, conceivably, a batch or barrel of potatoes could have bobbed ashore. About a year later though, Sir Walter Raleigh reportedly brought the plant from North American to his estate in County Cork, experimentally producing what may have been the first crop of not-very-Irish potatoes. Unfortunately, he also gave some to the English Queen mum, but the kitchen staff of Elizabeth the First did not know what to do with the lumpy things. As that story has it, the cooks threw away the edible potato parts, boiled the poisonous leaves, and ruined an otherwise elegant dinner, thus causing the vegetable to be promptly banned from all near future events.
Since that particular potato incident set the plant’s reputation back a bit, it remained an outcast in Europe, perhaps until North Americans began to demonstrate their hearty appetites and undeniably good health. According to a side dish of the story though, Irish immigrants began cultivating potatoes in the American colonies, and not the other way around. This tale has some merit since, almost from its start among English-speaking peoples, the vegetable became known as “The Irish Potato,” presumably to distinguish the patata from the Spanish-named batata or sweet potato. Yet another tale, however, has Sir Francis Drake taking potatoes and tobacco from Colombia to Britain with a stop-over in North America, rather than Ireland. At any rate, properly pared and prepared potatoes had begun to grace Irish plates somewhere between the mid 17th century and the early 1700s. By the end of the 18th century, Frenchmen had fried their edicts, and noble French women had woven regal potato blossoms into their high-fashioned hair.

The next hundred or so years dished up a golden era for potatoes until they suddenly succumbed to the blight of 1845, the dark year in which the Irish Potato Famine began. Almost overnight, fungi settled in like fog, killing crops, stinking up the countryside, and plaguing farms until the turn of the decade. By 1851, the fungi, identified over a century later as Phytophthora infestans, had destroyed most of the country’s crop, leaving at least a half-million people—possibly one million or more —dead of starvation. Another one to two million reluctantly left the country, often settling among relatives in the United States or Great Britain. For those who remained in Ireland, the blight continued, not with mold and fungi, but with poverty, homelessness, and laws requiring the already small farms to be subdivided among heirs. Countless people roamed the city streets or wandered the countryside with no recourse but to dig holes in the ground and cover those earthen caves with sticks to provide shelter for their families.
How could such a terrible tragedy occur? Too many factors converged to single out just one. Yet most of the stories agree that the initial appeal of potato planting came because of the enormous amount of food that can be grown on a small plot of land or in poor soil. Besides this propensity for compact growth, each potato packs in energizing nutrients, such as carbohydrates, protein, Vitamin C, complex B vitamins, potassium, phosphorus, magnesium, and iron. Identifying those healthful properties, however, also uncovered toxins in the greenery. For example, solanine may lurk in the thin green layer beneath the skin, but cooking cures that problem and breaks down indigestible starches too.

While eating a raw potato can send a stomach into upheaval, almost any form of cooking works well. Depending on regional preferences, a cook may bake, boil, broil, roast, mash, or fry Irish potatoes with such success that this once rejected vegetable has become the fourth largest crop in the world, taking its high-ranking position right after wheat, rice, and corn. In Ireland, cooks often add a dash of fennel and a dollop of cream to give their potatoes a distinctly “Irish” flavor, or they might fry up some chips. Irish cooks also add varying portions of flour, butter, and milk to make potato pancakes or pat up a potato cake dough that’s lightly kneaded, rolled, then divided into fourths or farls. Lightly fried on either side, a potato farl (with or without the apricot jam) would surely be fit for a queen. Regardless, the development of recipes and the cultivation of facts eventually overcame the rumors. Surprisingly though, by 2005, the largest potato producer in the world was not Ireland, England, or the Americas, but China! Like a good story, a good word about a good food apparently gets around.

By Mary Sayler