You say potato. I say a food that has transformed our daily lives
The humble potato is one of the history-shaping foods highlighted by Alex Renton in his book 13 Foods That Shape Our World. Here is an extract:
From the food of necessity and hardship, the potato is now central to cooking for pleasure, not just as fuel, across the world.
How many words are there for the magical transformations of a potato in the kitchen? A dozen or more come up without having to think: mash, hash, rosti, roast, souffle, boil, croquette, crisp, dice, salad, chip. Not to mention all the potato flour breads, from scones to tortillas, and pommes dauphinoises, where French potato cuisine reaches for the cream-laden divine.
The Irish, with the Spanish, were Europe’s earliest and most enthusiastic adopters of the potato – it once defined their nation as beef did the British or leeks the Welsh. And it is a good bet the Irish have more ways of enjoying potatoes than even the French, who were the first nation to explore the potato in cooking for the wealthy middle classes.
Long before the first French recipes were published in the 1800s, rural Irish people were eating more potatoes than anyone else. With the exception of rice in poorer parts of Asia, no one staple carbohydrate has been so central to a nation’s diet. The chronicler Arthur Young toured Ireland between 1776 and 1778, writing about the economics of the poor – people who generally lived upon “potatoes and sour milk … with, now and then, a herring”.
One family of six, he observed, could eat 252lb (114kg) of potatoes a week. It sounds like a vast amount. But it amounts to just a couple of mediumsized potatoes on each plate at a meal. It was not so poor a diet, either: “The potato is the best single bundle of nutrition there is,” says potato historian John Reader. It could be boring, of course. The addition of those herring made a key difference.
In rural Sweden the same was true: a famous dish of sliced potatoes stewed with pickled young herring or anchovies is called Jansson’s Temptation, possibly after a 19th-century pastor who easily resisted all pleasures of the flesh except this crusty, pungent dish.