SC - Potatoes (Sweet, Etc.)-LONG
Elise Fleming
alysk at ix.netcom.com
Sat Nov 8 10:20:41 PST 1997
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 _Americas 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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