"A Brief History of Foods" is mostly aimed at improving my knowledge on the origins of the foodstuffs commonly eaten in Britain throughout its long history. Over the years I have been surprised to learn how few of our commonly used ingredients are actually native to these shores, and just how many were introduced, when and by whom. Perhaps you too might discover something new and quite interesting.
Cultivated potatoes all belong to one botanical species, Solanum tuberosum, but this includes hundreds,
if not thousands, of different varieties.
The 200 wild potato species originated in the South American Andes
inhabiting a range that extends from high cold mountains and plateaus into
warmer valleys and subtropical forests and drier semi-arid regions and coastal
valleys.
According to "The Cambridge World History Of Food" (edited by Kenneth F. Kiple and Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas, and published in two volumes by Cambridge University Press in 2000) it was Spanish explorers who first encountered the potato in Peru,
Bolivia, Colombia, and Ecuador in the 16th century. They compared the
unfamiliar tuber to truffles, and adopted the Quechua name “papa”.
The first specimens probably reached Spain
around AD 1570. Sailors returning from the
Andes to Spain with silver presumably carried maize and potatoes for their own
food on the trip. It is speculated, therefore, that
leftover tubers (and maize) were carried ashore and planted. From there, the potato spread via herbalists
and farmers to Italy, the Low Countries and England. There was likely a
second introduction of the potato to England sometime in the following twenty years. On Sir Francis Drake's
round-the-world voyage (1577 to 1580), for example, his first encounter with potatoes was recorded in 1578 off the Chilean coast. Despite British folklore crediting Drake with the introduction of the potato to Britain, this
could not have been the case as it is highly unlikely that the tubers would have survived a further two years at sea.
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