SPUDS AND TATERS

Without the nightshade botanical family, serious cooks would have a tough time

surviving. Potato is the most humble and most basic member of this family with a tremendous

staying power. Potato was "in" 200 years ago and they are still "in" today. Virtually everyone

likes them. Potato is one of the most popular, most important vegetable in the world and

undoubtedly the most important root vegetable. The Irish potato famine (1845 to 1849) showed

that people can and do live on a diet of little else but potatoes. When a potato blight hit and

wiped out their only crop, a million Irish perished of starvation in just a few years.

Through culinary evolutions and revolutions, potatoes remain on the menus of western

cultures. One reason is that the potato is hard to ruin. It is forgiving of your cooking errors and

ends up edible even if you have the least cooking skill and pay minimal attention. For people

who know nothing at all about cooking and detest the kitchen, the food processing industry

invented instant potatoes, which are both faster and easier to prepare than the real thing, though

its flavor and texture resemble potato’s like a horse-and-buggy resembles the automobile.

Potato Facts

Where it came from

The potato has been traced back to South and Central Americas where over 150 species

still grow in the wild. The Spanish introduced it to their homeland in the late 1500s, from where

it spread slowly to the rest of Western Europe and eventually the whole world. By the time it

found its way to North America in the early 1700s, potatoes were all over in Europe as animal

feed and as staple food for the poor. Western cuisines prefer potatoes as their carbohydrate starch

of choice, unlike the eastern cuisines where rice is king.

A single species of potato, Solanum tuberosum, accounts for almost all the world's crop.

There are seven other species that are only locally cultivated in Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and

Venezuela.

How potato grows

The edible part of the potato plant is the enlarged tip of an underground stem, called a

tuber. In wild plants this enlargement is small, just a swelling of the stem, but cultivation

progressively favored plants with larger swellings until they became the size they are today—up

to a pound (half a kilo) apiece commonly but even two-pound (a kilo) potatoes are not

uncommon—enough to feed a family of six

Nutrition

The potato is a very nutritious vegetable and not at all fattening. The fattening part is

what you add to it or pile up on top of it—butter, sour cream or the oil that it absorbs while you

fry it. It is a good source of carbohydrates (60 to 90 percent of total solids). The carbohydrate is

in the form of starch (both amylose and amylopectin, the same as in rice; see The most common

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