Potato porridge

On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the potato porridge title. The potato was the first domesticated vegetable in the region of modern-day southern Peru and extreme northwestern Bolivia between 8000 and 5000 BCE. It arrived in Europe sometime before the end of the 16th century by two different ports of entry: the first in Spain around 1570, and the second via the British Isles between 1588 and 1593.

There is also recent evidence from stone tools of potatoes suggesting evidence of potatoes existing as far back as 3400 BC. Archeological evidence also shows that throughout the formative period from 1500 BC to 500 BC and Tiwanaku period in the Andes, potatoes and tubers became increasingly popular as a crop and food. Boiled and steamed potatoes and tubers replaced soups throughout the formative period. Aside from these remains, in the Peruvian archaeological record, the potato was uncovered as a design influence of ceramic pottery in the Altiplanos, often in the shape of vessels. In the Altiplano, potatoes provided the principal energy source for the Inca Empire, its predecessors, and its Spanish successor. Andean people prepared their potatoes in a variety of ways, such as mashed, baked, boiled, and stewed in ways similar to modern methods. The Andean people also prepared a dish called papas secas, which was a process that involved boiling, peeling, and chopping.

Columbian Mapuches, “specially in the southern and coastal Mapuche territories where maize did not reach maturity”. Sailors returning from the Andes to Spain with silver presumably brought maize and potatoes for their own food on the trip. Europeans in South America were aware of the potato by the mid-16th century but refused to eat the plant. For the Spaniards the potato was regarded as a food for the natives: the Spanish conquerors speak most favourably of the potato, but they recommend it especially for the natives who have to do the heaviest jobs. The potato first spread in Europe for non-food purposes. It was regarded with suspicion and fear due to it being a member of the nightshade family.

Europeans assumed its resemblance to nightshade meant that it was the creation of witches or devils. At first it was mostly used as fodder for livestock or to feed the starving. The Spanish had an empire across Europe and brought potatoes for their armies. Peasants along the way adopted the crop, which was less often pillaged by marauding armies than above-ground stores of grain. In France, at the end of the 16th century, the potato had been introduced to the Franche-Comté, the Vosges of Lorraine and Alsace. The potato had a large effect on European demographics and society, due to the fact that it yielded about three times the calories per acre of grain while also being more nutritive and growing in a wider variety of soils and climates, significantly improving agricultural production in the early modern era.

Despite this it took a while to catch on. It is generally believed that potatoes entered Africa with colonists, who consumed them as a vegetable rather than as a staple starch. Shipping records from 1567 show that the first place outside of Central and South America where potatoes were grown were the Canary Islands. In higher regions of Rwanda, potatoes have become a new staple food crop. Recently farmers have developed the potato as a cash crop after introducing several new varieties brought back by migrant laborers from Uganda and other varieties from Kenya. The potato diffused widely after 1600, becoming a major food resource in Europe and East Asia. Following its introduction into China toward the end of the Ming dynasty, the potato immediately became a delicacy of the imperial family.

In India, Edward Terry mentioned the potato in his travel accounts of the banquet at Ajmer by Asaph Khan to Sir Thomas Roe, the British Ambassador in 1675. The vegetables gardens of Surat and Karnataka had potatoes as mentioned in Fyer’s travel record of 1675. Early colonists in Virginia and the Carolinas may have grown potatoes from seeds or tubers from Spanish ships, but the earliest certain potato crop in North America was brought to New Hampshire in 1719 from Derry. The plants were from Ireland, so the crop became known as the “Irish potato”. 39 persuaded peasants and landlords in central and northern Russia to devote their fallow fields to raising potatoes. Potatoes yielded from two to four times more calories per acre than grain did, and eventually came to dominate the food supply in Eastern Europe. King Frederick the Great of Prussia, a potato proponent, inspects an early harvest.

In the German lands, Frederick the Great, king of Prussia, strove successfully to overcome farmers’ skepticism about the potato, and in 1756 he issued an official proclamation mandating its cultivation. The crop slowly spread across Europe, such that, for example, by 1845 it occupied one-third of Irish arable land. In Britain, the potato promoted economic development by underpinning the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century. It served as a cheap source of calories and nutrients that was easy for urban workers to cultivate on small backyard plots.

In Ireland, the expansion of potato cultivation was due entirely to the landless labourers, renting tiny plots from landowners who were interested only in raising cattle or in producing grain for market. A lack of genetic diversity from the low number of varieties left the crop vulnerable to disease. HERB-1 began to spread in the Americas, especially Central and North America destroying many crops. The Lumper potato, widely cultivated in western and southern Ireland before and during the Great Famine, was bland, wet and poorly resistant to the potato blight, but yielded large crops and usually provided adequate calories for peasants and labourers. By the 1960s, the Canadian Potato Research Centre in Fredericton, New Brunswick, was one of the top six potato research institutes in the world. Established in 1912 as a Dominion Experimental Station, the station began in the 1930s to concentrate on breeding new varieties of disease-resistant potatoes. Beginning in the 1960s Chilean agronomist Andrés Contreras begun to collect neglected local varieties of potatoes in Chiloé Archipelago and San Juan de la Costa.

In modern times potatoes have grown in popularity due to their versatility and ability to be used for many different dishes of food. A single domestication for potato based on multilocus amplified fragment length polymorphism genotyping”. Hillman, Foraging and Farming: The Evolution of Plant Exploitation. Archaeological potato tuber remains from the Casma Valley of Peru. Beyond Raised Fields: Exploring Farming Practices and Processes of Agricultural Change in the Ancient Lake Titicaca Basin of the Andes”. The Archaeology of Food and Social Inequality in the Andes”. DNA from herbarium specimens settles a controversy about origins of the European potato”.