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[Alderton, Philippa]

Greetings!  Here is some more fodder for discussion.  At the end, 
Sophie Coe discusses what happened with Gerard and his Herbal.  One of 
her comments (near the end) would lead to the conclusion that there is 
no place in SCA feasts for white potatoes.

Sophie Coe on potatoes, sweet potatoes, and yams:  Excerpts from her 
book _America’s First Cuisines_.

(p. 19)  “The history of the potato is inextricably mixed with the 
history of the sweet potato and that of several other plants as well.  
If anyone has doubts as to the utility and necessity of Latin names, 
let this be a lesson for them, because the common names, ‘[a[as’, 
‘batatas’, ‘papatas’, give us only the vaguest idea of what is being 
talked about.”...

(p. 19)  “This being the case we must define our terms.  By pototo I 
mean the tubers of ‘Sonanum tuberosum’ and other species of ‘Solanum.’  
By sweet potato, or ‘batata’, I mean the thickened roots of ‘Ipomoea 
batatas’.  There are three kinds of sweet potatoes eaten in the United 
States today, an old-fashioned white kind, a hardy dry ellow kind, and 
a moist, sweet, dark orange kind, miscalled a yam.  True yams are 
members of the Dioscoridae family, among them one unfortunately named 
‘Dioscorea batatas’ but domesticated in the Old World, and another 
named ‘Dioscorea trifida’, a New World domesticate.  With the New World 
yams we will have nothing further to do, except to say that if they 
were the ‘ages’ or ‘n~ames’ Columbus and his successors found in the 
West Indies, they were considered inferior to sweet potatoes, a 
quick-growing food fit only for servants and slaves.”

(p. 20)  “The New World history of the sweet potato is complex.  The 
Uto-Aztecan word ‘camotli’ seems to be the root of all the words found 
for it in the Pacific area, for the sweet potato is found not only in 
the New World but also in Polynesia, from Hawaii to Easter Island to 
New Zealand.....the sweet potato could have been taken to Polynesia, 
either deliberately or on the drifting boat so beloved by the 
diffusionists.  Polynesians could also have fetched it, although such 
visitors were probably much more in danger of being turned into 
foodstuffs themselves than returning with novel foodstuffs.  The third 
possible scenario is that the sweet potato did not stop in Spain when 
it arrived there after Columbus but continued its eastward journey, so 
that when explorers got to Polynesia in the eighteenth century the 
sweet potato had had time to become thoroughly embedded in the culture. 
 However, when there was a famine in Fukien province in 1593, the 
Chinese authorities sent a mission to the island of Luzon to find new 
food plants.  The commission returned the following year with a new 
food plant, the sweet potato, which remains to this day the food of the 
indigent in China.  The Philippines were of course in contact with 
Mexico via the Manila galleons which sailed from Acapulco to Manila and 
may have brought sweet potatoes as they brought many other New World 
plants.”

(p. 21)  The potato, ‘Solanum tuberosum’ and allies, did not travel as 
swiftly as the sweet potato, even if we reject the possibility that the 
sweet potato could make it from Spain to the Philippine island of Luzon 
in less than a century.  The potato was not even seen by the Europeans 
until the 1530s, when they conquered the cold highlands of Colombia and 
Peru.  That is to say, cultivated potatoes were not seen by the 
Europeans until that time.  More than two hunderes species of wild 
tuber-bearing potatoes exist in the New World, growing from the state 
of Colorado in the United States south to Chile and Argentina, but if 
the Europeans ever noticed anybody eating them, they did not record 
it.”

(p.21)  “There was a flurry of descriptions of the potato in the 
herbals of the late sixteenth century.  It was at this time that the 
British botanist Gerard planted the seeds, or perhaps one should say 
the potato eyes, of trouble when he confused ‘Solanum tuberosum’ from 
South America with ‘Apios tuberosa’, the ground nut, which was eaten by 
Indians and early colonists in Virginia.  For years the 
English-speaking world called ‘Solanum tuberosum’ the Virginia potato 
and thought it came from Virginia and had been domesticated there, even 
though there were no wild potatoes to be found there, nor any 
domesticated ones either.”

(p. 23)  “After this almost everybody in Europe lost interest in the 
potato for several hundred years.  The one place it did take root was 
Ireland, where the seventeenth-century diarist John Evelyn knew it as 
the Irish potato and thought it an acquired taste, only suitable for 
the poor, or for the servants when it was necessary to reduce expenses 
(Evelny 1818, 2:292).”

Alys K.

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