Heaps tatties
Humble potato is still the UK’s favourite vegetable
FORGET fancy artichokes and aubergines, the humble tattie is still King of the Veg. Yes, the plain old potato has just been voted Britain’s best-loved vegetable – that’s one in the eye for carrots and it will leave broccoli, peas and beans green with envy.
In the poll by sauce firm Dolmio, 72 per cent said potatoes had the most a-peel while artichokes and okra were the most detested.
More than half said they were fussy about eating greens and 74 per cent don’t get their five-a-day. But we can’t get enough tatties – so here are some potato facts to chew on.
Each year the world grows enough to cover a 4-lane motorway circling the world six times.
The potato originated in what is now Peru and Bolivia and was cultivated by the Inca people from 8000 to 5000 BC. The name of their goddess Axomamma means “potato mother”.
16th century conquistadors from Spain first brought the spud to Europe. “Potato” comes from the Spanish “patata”. But “spud” is from the Latin “spad”, meaning sword, which became the English “spade.” Because to plant potatoes you need to dig a hole.
Potatoes are now the world’s fourth largest food crop after maize, wheat and rice. Experts say their introduction led to a quarter of world growth and urbanisation between 1700 and 1900.
Sir Walter Raleigh first brought potatoes to the court of Queen Elizabeth I in 1585. But her cooks tossed out the tubers and boiled the stems and leaves. Everyone who ate them got the runs, which led to a ban for several years.
That’s because potatoes are related to deadly nightshade and the greenery contains the poisonous compounds solanines and glycoalkaloids. So do green tubers but cooking kills the toxins. However, potato juice (they are 80 per cent water) is a good remedy for gastritis. And an old fashioned headache remedy is to place sliced raw potatoes on your forehead.
The Incas freeze- dried tatties to preserve them and America rediscovered the technique centuries later, launching “instant mash potato granules” in the 50s .
UK brand Smash arrived in the 1960s and was famously advertised on TV by robot Martians mocking the way earthlings “peel potatoes with their metal knives, boil them for 20 of their minutes, then smash them all to bits”. The slogan “For Mash, Get Smash” is still one of the best-known ever. There are roughly 5000 varieties of potato, 99 per cent of which are descended from a single species. Potatoes can be deadly weapons. In 2015, a 55-year-old Danish man killed his older brother by force-feeding him MARS ATTACK Smash alien with tatties. And on Christmas Day 2015, Daniel Burgess, 38, from Newlyn, Cornwall was jailed for killing a neighbour with carbon monoxide poisoning by stuffing a potato into his gas flue.
Potatoes can power bulbs or clocks. Their acid reacts with positive and negative electrodes to create a current. Tests in Jerusalem showed that a spud boiled for eight minutes produced 10 times more power than a raw one.
Potatoes are grown in more than 125 countries and eaten by more than a billion people daily. China grew 88.9million metric tons in 2013 alone. India, Russia, Ukraine and the USA are the next biggest producers.
From 1845 to 1852 Irish potatoes were devastated by a blight called phytophthora infestans. The Great Potato Famine led to a million deaths and another million emigrations (many to the US) and the population of Ireland fell by more than 20 per cent. The war of Bavarian Succession (1778-9) is also TATTIE TRIO One of 5000 varieties known as the Potato War. Troops on both sides were so famished they spent much of the time foraging for potatoes to stay alive.
Two US companies, Mail A Spud and Potato Parcel, deliver tubers bearing personal messages.
In June 1974, a restaurant called Spudulike opened in Tollcross, Edinburgh, serving filled baked potatoes. Who knew you could put prawn cocktail on a spud? In 1979, it was bought by the British School of Motoring and rapidly expanded through franchises. By 2001, it had 50 UK outlets and it is still going strong. Baked beans are the No1 topping.
2008 was international year of the potato. The United Nations put on events and ran potato-based art and photography competitions.
Ex-US vice president Dan Quayle went down in history as the Veep who couldn’t spell potato. Visiting an elementary school in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1992, he “corrected” the word written on a chalk board by a child, adding a letter E. He later wrote: “It was more than a gaffe. It was a ‘defining moment’ of the worst imaginable kind. I can’t overstate how discouraging and exasperating the
whole event was.”
Mr Potato Head was invented by New Yorker George Lerner in 1949 then marketed by Hasbro. It was the first toy ever advertised on TV. For years, the plastic eyes, ears, noses, hats and glasses had to be stuck on to real potatoes. The plastic one arrived in 1962.
Potatoes have inspired art. Van Gogh painted The Potato Eaters in 1885 and Prayer for the Potato Crop in 1857 was artist JeanFrançois Millet’s reaction to a famine in Europe.
A 2006 movie called Faith Like Potatoes follows the story of a Zambian-Scottish man called Angus who discovers religion and decides to be a potato farmer.
In 1995, the first spuds grown off the face of the earth were germinated on the Space Shuttle Columbia. Then in 2016 scientists at Peru’s International Potato Centre grew a plant in a container mimicking conditions in space.
The Mashed Potato was a 60s dance. Dee Dee Sharp promoted it along with her song Mashed Potato Time but it’s better known from a line in the 1963 UK No. 1 Do You Love Me by Brian Poole and the Tremeloes.
US president Thomas Jefferson introduced “French Fries” to the US by serving them at the White House in 1802. Today, almost a third of the US potato crop goes into making them.