Potatoes The World's Staple

 Tomorrow being St Patrick's Day most recipes turn to something with potatoes. Yet these tubers not only fed the Irish but the whole worldl  Europe readily  embraced then as did the rest of the world. Today they are one of the staples in every home chef's and restaurant's kitchen. There  were a Meso American staple before that feeding the tribes of North and South America.

What are potatoes exactly? They're sort of a veggie but not in the traditional sense.  They come from the perennial nightshade and are related to Bella Donna , deadly nightshade. Their tamer cousins include peppers, tomatoes and eggplants however all have deadly to eat leaves that are full of the toxin solanine. It first came from the Peruvian Andes along with Bolivia. They are one of the world's oldest used foods , having been domesticated between seven and ten thousand years ago. The Spanish brought them over to Europe, post- Columbus and they took off in Eastern and Northern Europe. There are now five thousand kinds of them now  as India and CHina lead the world in potato production. The word comes from the Spanish patata which derives from the Taino word batata meaning sweet potato. The spud comes from Britain where it originally meant a short and stout knife ,It came from the Danish Spyd which means spear. The taters look like like spears in a wat.

European cooking embraced this New World  favorite.  A modified form of Chilean fried potatoes made their way to Spain where Saint Theresa of Avila and turned them into what would be considered the forerunner of modern fries. Even though Belgium and France have a running feud over who created the first modern ones it is France that is the originator do them. It wasn't even a Frenchman who cut and fried the first batch! That honor belongs to Bavarian Frederic Kreiger who fired them on a roaster in the famed Montmartre section in 1842. The British embrace them as they became the perfect foil for batter fried cod for their famed fish and chips. They bounced back over the Atlantic to become an American staple , perfect tiwth German hamburgers or fried chicken. However the tuber was elevated by the French and Italians. The French  turned them into Pommes Dauphinoise or scalloped potatoes , layers of delciated slices surrounded by cream milk and cheese. The Northern Italians plumped them into little pillows of goodness called gnocchi. The Germans created a heartier fare , kartoffel glace  round balls of them stuffed with a small piece for gingerbread.

Amazing what one tuber did to the world. Potatoes are not part of the Irish diet ,They're part of everyone's diet  and have been for centuries.