Potatoes

POTATOES

POTATOES. The so-called Irish potato, a native of the Andes, was introduced into England in the sixteenth century. A ship is known to have carried potatoes from England to Bermuda in 1613, and in 1621 the governor of Bermuda sent to Governor Francis Wyatt of Virginia two large chests filled with plants and fruits then un-known to the colony, among them potatoes, which were planted and grown in the settlements along the James River. In 1622 a Virginia bark brought about twenty thousand pounds of potatoes from Bermuda to Virginia. Their cultivation did not spread widely, however, until a party of Scotch-Irish immigrants brought potatoes with them to Rockingham County, New Hampshire, in 1719. Because of this introduction and because potatoes had become a major crop in Ireland by the end of the seventeenth century, "Irish" became a permanent part of the potato's name.

The Swedish botanist Peter Kalm found potatoes being grown at Albany in 1749. Thomas Jefferson wrote of cultivating potatoes, "both the long [sweet?] and the round [Irish?]." Decades later, the Navaho Indians of the Southwest were found to be planting a small, wild variety common in some parts of Mexico. The Irish potato came to be a daily item on the American dinner table—especially in the northern states as an accompaniment for meats—and a major food crop in many states during the nineteenth century. Aroostook, the large, northernmost county of Maine, began extensive potato growing, and in 1935 that county's potatoes produced half of the agricultural income of Maine. Aroostook homemakers are said to have been the first, or among the first, to make starch for their white garments by soaking potato pulp in water and then drying it. Starch sheds began to appear along the streams, and eventually Aroostook produced 90 percent of the nation's potato starch. The use of this starch declined greatly in the twentieth century, and industrial alcohol appeared as a new means of saving the culls and the surplus.

Sweet potatoes (botanically, wholly unrelated to the Irish tuber) were being cultivated by the Amerindians before the arrival of Christopher Columbus, who, with the other members of his party, ate these potatoes and esteemed them highly. Because they were best grown in the South, and because they gave an enormous yield (200 to 400 bushels per acre), they became a favorite vegetable in that region, although they remained unknown to the table in large areas of the North. To the southern poor, sweet potatoes inevitably accompanied opossum meat, although they were also served with fresh pork and other meats; the sweet potato has of ten been the main item in the diet of some poor families, especially in winter. The cultivation of sweet potatoes spread to California and gradually crept up the Atlantic coast as far as New Jersey.

By 1999 annual U.S. production of Irish potatoes had reached 478 million hundredweight; production of sweet potatoes in the same year totaled nearly 12 million hundredweight.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Salaman, Redcliffe N. The History and Social Influence of the Potato. Revised ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. The original edition was published in 1949.

Zuckerman, Larry. The Potato: How the Humble Spud Changed the Western World. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1998.

Alvin F. Harlow / c. w.

See also Agriculture ; Agriculture, American Indian .