Fw: Fw: [Sca-cooks] More on potatoes and chilies

[Phlip]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gene Anderson"
To: "Phlip" <phlip at 99main.com>
Cc: <t.d.decker at worldnet.att.net>
Sent: Thursday, June 10, 2004 1:19 PM
Subject: Re: Fw: [Sca-cooks] More on potatoes and chilies


> Bear, are you out there?  Glad to meet you!
> You're absolutely right about the potatoes and their geography.  The sw
pot
> comes from lowland eastern South America and spread up through the
Antilles
> and Central America.  The wh p comes, as you know, from Peru, but did not
> do well in Europe until people realized that the potatoes bred by the
> Mapuche of Chile for temperate conditions were the ones to draw
> on.  Peruvian potatoes are timed to live with an
> equal-day-equal-night-all-year regime.  The Mapuche genius was to breed
> Peruvian potatoes with local wild Chilean relatives to get a potato that
> would flourish in long-day-summer conditions.  Europe, especially North
> Europe, couldn't do well with white potatoes until they realized that
> Mapuche potatoes had special moxie.
>
> Yeah, the Manila galleon introduced all the New World food crops to the
> Philippines, with their Nahuatl (Aztec) names, like camote for sweet
potato
> and chile (Nahuatl chilitl) for chile.  On the way back, it brought
> saladitos (Chinese hsien-mei, pickled sour apricots) and dried shrimp and
> such to China.  Rice and black beans mixed, called "moros y Cristianos" in
> most of Spanish America, are called by a Tagalog name around Acapulco,
> where the Manila galleon docked.
>
> The theory that the Chinese got to the Americas before Columbus is
> nuts.  The recent book about 1420 is up there with Elvis in a flying
> saucer.  The only contact across the Pacific that is actually documented
is
> the Polynesian voyaging that brought the sweet potato to Polynesia just
> before Columbus.  But apparently it never spread beyond Polynesia--it was
> new to New Guinea in the 19/20 C and spread like wildfire there, showing
> what would have happened if it had got there earlier.  The coconut was
> probably introduced to the west coast of tropical America by the
> Polynesians around 1400.
>
> Lots more fascinating potato lore in James Long, NOTES OF A POTATO
WATCHER, > and R. Salaman's classic THE HISTORY AND SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF THE
> POTATO.  You probably know the Coes' book AMERICA'S FIRST CUISINES, which
> is super.
> best--Gene Anderson
>
>