With all this gloomy talk of the possible millennium computer chaos, and morbid forecasts that our Celtic Tiger can't go on for long, a pessimistic friend announced that he was going, for the first time in decades, to put down potatoes for his own family's consumption. As you grow older, too, he says, you value this wonderful plant more and more. Why, even boiled straight, and eaten slice by slice, various species have a recognisable taste, and need little more than a dash of salt and, if you like, a smear of butter. They do more than sustain life. They satisfy the taste buds and the hunger. And, of course, Europe has lived on the potato for centuries.
Around about the time Raleigh is supposed to have brought it into these islands, potatoes were being cultivated on mainland Europe. Fernand Braudel, the great social historian, in his second volume of The Identity of France, quoted John Gerard (whose herbal was mentioned here recently) and a Frenchman, Charles de l'Escluse (but living in Frankfurt am Main) as being the real introducers of potatoes to Europe in 1568 and 1588 respectively. They were of two different varieties. But it was the next century before they took hold. Move on a good bit to one Antoine Parmentier who was a prisoner in Prussia during the Seven Years War and there discovered the delights of the potato (washed down, as Braudel writes, "with gin".) Germany was a pioneer, but it soon spread to France. England resisted the potato for long, he says, but "poverty-stricken Ireland had converted to the new food by the latter half of the 17th century". And, he claims, it was the Irish who introduced the potato to English and later American farms.
On a map, Braudel shows the first date for the potato in various parts of Europe: Frankfurt and Vienna in 1588; then Montpellier in southern France in 1595, Madrid 1598. "What an abundant manna," wrote a Frenchman in 1791, "for it can be used at the table of the masters, the stewards, or farmhands or to feed the poultry, turkeys and pigs. And enough to give to the poor, to sell and so on." That's all history. We have many recipes to hand, if you fail to enjoy the simple boiled potato. Elizabeth David in French Provincial Cooking has a long roll of dishes. Dauphine, for example, sliced and baked with cheese and cream and about 40 other ideas. Mrs Beeton is not imaginative.