The Potato has its own story to tell too
After wheat, the potato is without doubt the most precious of all the edible plants we consume. If you have never thought about this, cast your mind back to times of war and consider the tactics that the Sioux deployed in order to conserve their daily ration of this invaluable tubercle. And yet, its presence in our daily diet does not go back very far, hardly two centuries ago, and even then after much hesitation and trial and error.
The potato or “ready-made loaves that God has given us” originates in South America and still today it grows in the wild on the middle plateaus of the Andean Cordillera sprawling out towards the border with Chili and its Araucania region.
Local peasant farmers were already growing several varieties of potatoes there a long time before the Spanish arrived and before Europeans even knew that these regions existed or only had a very vague knowledge of the coastline. For us, these inlands were totally unexplored and only marked on the maps under the laconic and rather mysterious name of “Terra incognita” (land of the unknown). Archaeologists have discovered examples of dried potato in pre-Columbian tombs as well as drawings on cave walls. Items of pottery made by the Incas sometimes have the same shape as the tubercle and artists used the famous potato “eyes” to decorative effect, contrary to the housewife and the soldier on potato-peeling duty who despair over them.
The travels of Christopher Columbus, who thought he had landed in India, inspired, as we know, the vocation of many intrepid adventurers and explorers who dreamed of visiting these far-off and fabulous countries and to take possession of them in the name of their sovereign. The conquest of Peru was undertaken in 1532 by Francisco Pizarro aided and abetted by his two brothers Gonzales and Hernando.
Amongst the thousands of objects that the Spanish held in delight on their arrival in this country at the height of the Inca civilization, was a sort of large truffle the local population called “papa” which they dug up from the ground and prepared as food or from which they used to extract a type of flour that was even whiter than that of wheat. One day, when curiosity got the better of their apprehensions, our adventurers from the other side of the globe, must have tasted these culinary preparations, but none of them fully realised that the “papa” plant could actually help to improve their diet at home where famine would come and go with disconcerting regularity. If perchance, some of them actually did think about it, many years would pass before they actually got round to doing anything.
In the end, the existence of the potato and its benefits was made known to the old world by one of the first priests to tread on Peruvian soil; Father Pedro de Cieça de Leon, who made the trip to Peru in 1533. On his return to Spain, he wrote and published his Cronica del Peru (in 1544), that has been famous ever since. It was the first document in which the new plant was mentioned and to which he gave the name “battata”. Along with this “coverage” another, even stranger, document exists. It concerns a contemporary manuscript containing three rather rough, but extremely invaluable, sketches. They depict the Incas planting and harvesting tubercles. You can also see, amongst other things, the special type of spade they used for digging. Without these drawings, it would have been extremely difficult to identify the strange agricultural instruments which have been found in several different tombs.
Once its discovery announced in such documents, it was not long before the “batatta” crossed the ocean, not, as you could well believe to improve our ancestors’ diet, but quite simply as an object of curiosity for the greater delight of a few collectors and scholars. It is generally accepted that a monk known as Jerome Cardan brought back the first specimens to Spain and, fresh from Peru, the tubercle started its long and arduous conquest of Europe.
Unfortunately it happened that several nations got to know the potato at about the same time with the result that, and it is still the case nowadays, they all claim the honour of having potatoes before their neighbours.
For a long time it was the British who laid claim to the glory of the discovery. They insist that in the 16th century their explorer Sir Walter Raleigh brought them back to the UK and introduced them in their new colony in the US, Virginia. Since then, British historians themselves have shown that this claim is based on little fact as firstly, the potato plant, object of so much discussion, did not arrive in North America until one hundred years later and secondly their hero’s ships never actually landed on Chilean or Peruvian shores!
Another British traveller, Sir Francis Drake, was also said to have introduced the same potato plant to the old world, apparently around 1580 after he had visited the small Chilean Island of Mocha and discovered it there. This tradition was so well fixed in the minds of our ancestors, that in the 19th century a statue was carved of the famous navigator, not in honour of his fruitful career as an explorer, but as a benefactor of humanity.
The sculptor who carved the statue of Sir Francis Drake offered it to the town of Strasbourg. One wonders if the latter found the work of art mediocre. We don’t really know why, but by all accounts the town did not want it. Understandably discontent, the artist searched for a buyer elsewhere and finally found an enthusiast on the other side of the river Rhine in Offenburg. This small city in Baden bought it to stand in one of its main squares (1853) and agreed that the sculptor, who was holding his grudge, could place the statue with its back turned towards Strasbourg! To this day, the great British navigator still stands enthroned on German soil on a high pedestal bearing inscriptions that remind the passer-by who cares to read them, that it was thanks to Drake that we have “kartoffels”.
From Spain the potato plant gained Italy where it was renamed “taratuffla” (ground truffle) which is where the German name comes from. It was also at this time that the tubercle first put in an appearance in our country. Indeed in 1587 the papal legate in our provinces gave Philippe de Sivry, lord of Walhain and future provost of Mons (1601) two potatoes and some seeds from the potato plant.
Having kept them for some time as rare objects, Philippe de Sivry judged it more purposeful and interesting to give them to a scholar. He made up his mind to present them to the already famous Charles de l’Escluse, otherwise known at the time as Clusius. Clusius was born in 1526 in Arras to a family originating in the neighbouring village of Lecluse. Charles was educated in Gand from where he went on to the College des Trois Langues in Leuven. Desiring to perfect his knowledge, he then went abroad. Indeed his entire life was spent travelling between different countries: England, France, Germany and so on and only on rare occasions did he actually return home. He was living in Vienna, where he was attached to the imperial court, when he received a small parcel from his correspondent in Mons. Without wasting time, he planted the whole lot in his garden and followed the growth of his new “lodgers” with extreme care. He had hardly finished his first “harvest” before he left the banks of the Danube to establish himself at the palace of William IV in Frankfurt-on-Main where he carried on studying the potato. When the plant came into full flower, he painted, or had painted, a splendid water colour depicting the adult plant and two tubercles that constituted a very useful representation for botanists. On the painting he penned in ink the inscription “Taratuffla, received in Vienna from Philippe de Sivry, 26th January 1588. Papas from Peru from Pierre Cieça.” This document still exists and is on display in one of the show cases at the Plantin Musuem in Antwerp.In 1601 a book “Rariorum plantarum historia” written by Clusius, in which he recorded his observations of the potato plant, was printed on thepharmacy printing presses formerly set up in this building.
The latter were certainly the order of the day in the scientific circles at the time. Other botanists also studied the potato plant and one of them, John Gerard, had himself painted in his herbarium in 1597 holding the stalk of a flowering potato plant between his fingers. Elsewhere, the Swiss botanist, Gaspard Bauhin later renamed the taratuffla “solanum tuberum” which is the designation that Carl Linnaeus retained in later years.
Despite the enthusiasm of scholars for the new plant, it still remained largely an object of decoration. It could be found growing in the gardens of several castles andcertain abbeys. We know, for example, that the potato plant grew in the gardens of the Norbertins of Dileghem, near Brussels and that the canon, Bernard Wynhouts, an esteemed orientalist and geographer of his day, looked after them with great care.
We do not know, and probably never will, at exactly what stage the “battata” abandoned its role of ornamental plant and started filling our boilers and being served at our ancestors’ tables. This important change in our diet was not provoked by being informed of its advantages by scholars and agronomists, but rather a matter of necessity dictated by circumstances. Indeed it required an extremely seriousneed to shake up and modify the nutritional routine of our forebears. The motive for this change confirms the truth of the old saying that would have us believe that “an empty stomach has no ears”.
In the early days potatoes were only used to feed animals. But when cereals were in small supply, whole populations did not hesitate to eat the mush they used to prepare as pig feed. To top it all, not only did we get used to eating potatoes, we even actually acquired a taste for them. In certain monasteries that had experienced hard times during periods of war, the monks did not hesitate to pull up vines and use the space instead for planting potatoes. Archived documents show that in Tuscany people were eating potatoes as early as the 17th century followed some time later by the Germans. In 1663 scholars in London tried acclimatising the potato in Ireland that was suffering from terrible famine. It was also hunger that encouraged the poor in Belgium to plant potatoes in their gardens.
Nonetheless, if the poor were planting potatoes by necessity, there was also a certain snobbism around that induced gourmets to include the potato in their regular diet. Thus in the Court of England potatoes were regularly consumed and in the spending records of King James 1st for food in the year 1613, it has been noted that twelve hundred pounds of potatoes at the price of twelve pence a pound were purchased.
Several years later, in 1620, the Carthusian Fathers were obliged to leave England and some of them decided to seek asylum in Belgium. One of the brothers, Father Robert Clark, had brought a few potatoes with him in his scanty baggage. Fired with the desire to help the inhabitants of the region of Nieuport where he lived, he used his enthusiasm and strength of persuasion to show the locals what they could get out of the potato. But the peasant farmers just shrugged their shoulders at him and told the kind father that he would be better off writing poems than teaching them their job ….
Nevertheless by the 18th century things had changed. Many regions had fallen on hard times and were suffering from famine. This is when the curious potato plant from America, the continent that would never cease to surprise us, finally came into its own and imposed its place in the diet of the famished populations. Gradually, in documents written during this period, we come across texts that describe the cultivation of the potato and it seems that it is in the actual province of Antwerp, in Puurs, that potatoes were planted in a field for the first time.
The French on the other hand remained hostile to the potato for a long time despite theagronomist, Antoine-Auguste Parmentier, who came from Montdidier, who devoted heart and soul, we can even say his whole life, to the cause of the potato. This fact earned him the epithet “inventor of the potato”. His work was seriously hampered by an impressive opponent: the medical profession. This body even went so far as to proclaim with great authority that the potato was responsible for numerous epidemics; that it provoked fever and even caused leprosy! Such cautions were certainly enough to frighten off even the bravest.
Nonetheless, Parmentier did not give up. After a long struggle he finally obtained permission to do experimental planting right under the nose of the Parisians, on waste ground situated on the edge of the capital city. The results were edifying and Antoine-Auguste, la “parmentière” was forgiven. King Louis XVIhimself followed with great attention the works of the tenacious advocate of the potato and showed him confidence and friendship; indeed, one day the King even turned up at Court wearing a flowering potato plant stalk in his button hole.
Again in France during this same period, prelates who were dismayed by the failing harvests, did all they could to support Parmentier. This included Monseigneur de Barral, bishop of Castres, who in 1765 distributed potatoes to the priests of his diocese with strict instructions to develop its cultivation in their parishes.
Such tenacious and combined efforts could only lead, in the end, to victory and at the dawn of the 19th century, the Peruvian “papa” obtained its right to existence in the south. In Belgium however, the potato had already been part of our diet for ages. It was in the region of Bruges that the potato was first commonly eaten. In 1704 it could only be found growing in one garden in the town, that of Antoine Verhulst. When times grew hard, he didn’t hesitate to distribute it amongst his fellow citizens. It was not long before the potato was being grown all over the place and gradually it put in an appearance in the city markets.
One question that readily comes to mind and more so to the minds of our women readers, is how did people use to prepare potatoes? Unfortunately no documents exist to explain this. Whilst it has been possible to gather snippets of information here and there, it would be rash to make a general supposition. In a document dating from 1730 we read that “they were cooked crispy in salt in the cinders”. As for “boiled potatoes”, they were first cooked this way during periods of famine when the inhabitants had to do with the gruel they used to feed their pigs. This cooking method has now been refined to produce potatoes that remain firm and do not disintegrate.
So this is how the world found itself a new foodstuff that, to a certain extent, could replace wheat. The colonising countries did not hesitate to acclimatize the potato in its overseas dominions and everywhere, through rational cultivation and careful selection of species, the potato has become an indispensable part of diet with its cultivation covering more and more ground. Nevertheless, even though it delighted the local populations, it did not have the same effect on a certain authority, an authority that even nowadays cannot make a claim for popularity from its citizens. Do we need to add that we are referring to income tax?
As early as the lateMiddle Ages, certain crops grown in open fields, and especially cereals, were subject to a special tax known as tithes. The levy of this tax and the rules that governed it were never “modernised”, as agriculture had evolved little over the centuries. But the introduction of the potato stirred up trouble in the tax offices because there was no legislation to allow the taxation of the new crop. There were endless court cases between the farmers and decimators. Masses of dossiers covered the desks of the court clerks up until the day when it was decided by edict, supreme consecration of the importance of the Incas’ “papa”, to subject the potato to tax.
Since then the potato has become such a part of our lives that no meal would seem right without it.
The history of potato fries is much shorter but none the less interesting and passionate.
Legend has it that round about the 1650s, the inhabitants of the Meuse Valley used to catch small fish and fry them.
Due to a mini period of glaciation the rivers remained frozen for long months. As the inhabitants couldn’t catch fish any more, they cut up potatoes in the form of fish and fried them instead.
Potato fries were born.
What characterises the good old Belgian potato fries?
First a good quality potato that does not disintegrate when fried.
The use of blanc de boeuf (white beef fat) to fry them in.
Frying the chips in two phases.
There are some 1,500 chip shops in Belgium and the consumption of potato fries both at home and in chip shops is very high.