[Sca-cooks] from a newbie

[Terry Decker]

>When did potatoes become available in Europe?  did they really come from
>the Andes and the conquest of the Incas?
>
>
>Linda

White potatoes are from the Andes.  Their discovery in about 1536 is usually
credited to Jiminez de Quesada who led the first expedition into Ecuador and
founded the city of Quito.  The first ones probably arrived in Spain between
1539 and 1545.

The first record of them in Europe is in the food stocks of the Hospital de
la Sangre in Seville in 1573.  These may have been grown in Spain, but not
widely, for they do not appear in Carolus Clusius's very thorough herbal of
the plants of Spain.

The first white potatoes in England arrived in 1586 and came into the
possesion of John Gerard, who describes them in his Herbal of 1597 as
"potatoes of Virginia."  The problem is there were no white potatoes in
Virginia at thet time, although there were groundnuts, Apios americana.  The
speculation is Gerard's potatoes came from Cartegena, which had been sacked
earlier that year by a fleet under Francis Drake which sailed north and
rescued the first Roanoke colony before returning to England.

Carolus Clusius received his first potato in 1587 via a friend who got his
plant from the Vatican envoy.  Clusius is the man who spread samples across
northern Europe.  There is a recipe found in the correspondence of two
German rulers from about 1597 and IIRC some scattered comments about
potatoes being eaten from around the turn of the 17th Century.

Johnna set me a reference to the first known planting of potatoes in Ireland
in (IIRC) 1609.

White potatoes are a fairly late arrival in Europe.  Maize, chili peppers
and New World squash appear in the Fuchs Herbal of 1547.  Potatoes do not.

For a more thorough coverage of the subject, I would suggest looking at our
earlier dicussions of the subject in the Florilegium, www.florilegium.org .

Bear