| FOOD RESOURCE COLLEGE OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SCIENCES, OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY |
The potato is an annual herbaceous plant of the nightshade family, SOLANACEAE. It is a dicotyledon, that is, it has two leaves in the embryo. At least 150 species produce tubers, with the common potato of the species TUBEROSUM. It is related to the tomato, eggplant, and pepper. The portion of the potato plant that is eaten is a part of the underground stem system used for food storage by the plant. "The potato tuber is an enlarged portion of the underground stem, rhizome or stolon. It represents mostly stored or surplus carbohydrate material not used by the plant for vegetative growth, fruiting and other essential life processes."
Potatoes of any kind or size should be firm, relatively smooth, clean, reasonably well shaped, not badly cut, bruised or skinned, nor should they show any green from light-burn. They should not be wilted or show sprouts. Cooking quality varies by variety and production areas. Aside from size, some types from some areas are known to be good bakers and French fryers. This is because they have a high content of dry matter. For boiling and salads, a potato of slightly higher moisture content is desirable.
At that, Brillat-Savarin was expressing a liberal view. In Purssia in 1774, Frederick the Great sent several wagonloads of potatoes to ease a famine in the city of Kolberg. Its starving citizens refused to eat them.
Maybe they were holding out for Marie antoinette's cake.
Or maybe they just didn't trust them. Like the tomato and corn, the potato arrived johnny-come-lately in Europe from the New World, and was not exactly welcomed with open mouths. Even in Peru, where it originated, it ran a poor third in Inca cultivation behind maize and quinoa. But it was hardy: Growing underground, it eluded the ravages of the elements. In the Andes, it was harvested at altitudes as high as 13,000 feet - a foreshadowing, perhaps, of the culinary heights it would eventually reach.
And reach them it would. In "The Merry Wives of Windsor," Shakespeare even touted the potato as an aphrodisiac, though it's possible he was actually referring to what we call the sweet potato. In the American middle class, men and women learned to proudly proclaim their allegiance to meat and potatoes, the way your father or grandfather might once have your father or grandfather might once have declared himself "a Studebaker man." Gradually this bitter basic - not much more than a beet with better nutrients - developed size, flavor and variety, moving up the social and culinary scales from lumpen proletariat to pommes noisettes.
The potato has been deeply entwined in the course of the human culture: For many poor people, stretching from Ireland to central Europe to the steppes of Asia, it became literally the staff of life. The root they took to talbe was small and not very tasty, but it kept them alive, so successfully that in some countries life expectancies rose significantly and population totals leaped. That success at the low end of the social and economic ladder led, in turn, to increasing pressure on the traditional hierarchies of government and helped bring about the modern age's ascendancy of the common man.
The potato may have been more important than Napoleon in reshaping Western culture. And still it doesn't get a lot of respect -- although it does have its own good Cold War joke, which goes something likes this:
Russian solider: Our army gives us 1,500 calories of food a day.
American solider: Gee, our army gives us 3,000 calories.
Russian soldier: You lie! Who could eat that many potatoes in a single day?
The Irish, for one. So important did the potato become morning, noon and night to the country's poor that Irish wives almost forgot how to prepare anything else. When the potato famine hit in the 1840s, it devastated the country and presented an unplanned gift to the young United States - an onrush of Irish labor and talent from immigrants escaping the blight for a new life.
The Irish potato famine also provided an early and vivid lesson in the value of biodiversity, and for that we can be thankful. Irish farmers had been relying almost exclusively on the Lumper, a bland but heavy-yielding variety that proved particularly susceptible to a fungal disease that hopped over the Continent. Almost overnight, the blight wiped out nearly all of the country's crop- and mass starvation ensued. In retrospect, the lesson was clear: Don't put all yoru eggs in a single biological basket. It's a lesson that modern agribusiness, from growers of wheat to bananas to replated trees, needs to constantly keep in mind: In variety is not just strength, but survival.