Cry Havoc, and Let Slip the Spuds of War
Staple though it is today, the lowly potato had a hard time reaching its preeminent status in Western cuisine. Perhaps its lengthy purgatory has something to do with the tale that when Sir Walter Raleigh gave some potatoes to Queen Elizabeth, her cooks tossed aside the roots and served up the boiled greens instead, causing a court-wide case of indigestion. Whether that’s the case or not—and there’s no evidence that Raleigh ever so much as set eyes on a potato—for decades Europeans would have nothing to do with the tuber. At best, it was found useful to feed the cattle. At worst, it was considered a leprosy-inducing invention of the devil.....MORE
This belief was particularly pernicious in the fair fields of France, a country at the time holding a quarter of Europe’s inhabitants despite its periodic decimation by epidemic and famine. By the beginning of the 17th century France’s population had reached twenty million and continued to rise. Clearly, a cheap, plentiful, and resilient crop was just what the nutritionist ordered, yet even in the face of the brutal demographic crises that popped up every ten to fifteen years over the next two centuries, each time lopping two or three million inhabitants off the non-existent voting rolls, the potato remained unpondered, unprized, and unplanted.
Clearly, the potato needed a champion. What it got was a pharmacist.
Captured by the Prussians in the Seven Years’ War (1754-1763), French pharmacist Antoine Parmentier became acquainted with the ignoble Solanum tuberosum while a prisoner of war. As a prisoner, he was fed little but boiled potato mash, which was sometimes his only food for a fortnight and a day. His jailers considered the tubers mere slops; Parmentier, finding them both nutritious and tasty, did not complain of the menu. In fact, he acquired rather a taste for it, and on achieving his freedom made it his mission in life to preach the spuds’ virtues. He realised that they could be a solution to the pesky problem of those massive famines sweeping through France with such distressing regularity.
But this one man’s realisation and his pannier of potatoes were up against a profusion of problems. The French were not only uninterested, they were convinced that potatoes were poisonous. The Parlement of Paris had even banned the tuber’s cultivation in 1748 in the belief that it caused leprosy. Why leprosy is unknown; perhaps it was due to the scabby and spotted nature of the potato’s skin. The Church, which collected a tax on all agricultural production and therefore profited but scantly from anything as cheap as the potato, pointed out that this strange root from America was not mentioned in the Bible, and must therefore be dangerous and evil—possibly even the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Apparently the serpent tempted Eve with a plate of fries.
The true peasantry of other countries—those who cared little for what the learned said and were more concerned with the emptiness of their bellies—had disproved the theories of poison some time before. If Parmentier was fed potatoes in Prussia, it was because the peasants of that country had been growing them for their own benefit. In a land forever being trampled by an endless succession of armies battling over various monarchical successions, the plucky potato had the distinct advantage of being grown underground, and the peasants were no more (nor no less) rickety for surviving on them. Frederick the Great eventually noticed and began distributing seeds and growing instructions free of cost, and they became a staple crop. In fact, the War of Bavarian Succession—the little 1778-1779 war, not the major Wars of Spanish, Polish, and Austrian Succession that took up the rest of the eighteenth century before the French Revolution became a new excuse for pan-European battling—became known as the “Potato War.” Some say this was because the soldiers spent their time raiding each other’s potato fields instead of fighting, others that they threw potatoes at each other instead of cannonballs, others yet that it simply happened to take place during the potato harvest. Whichever it was, this particular war has rarely been taken seriously.
But the fact that barbarous Prussians (against whom the French had been fighting for years), and barbarous peasants in some of the provinces, and barbarous foreigners of dubious taste were showing signs of a penchant for potatoes was unlikely to convince the churlish chauvinists of the world’s most civilised country of the tuber’s virtues. Parmentier therefore embarked on a series of scientific experiments that proved that the potato was perfectly nutritious. He summarised his proofs in a treatise presented to the Academy of Besançon when the latter ran a competition asking for suggestions regarding foods that could serve in times of famine. Parmentier’s treatise ran off with the laurels, but then as now, scientific evidence was worth little in the face of preconceived ideas. The potato remained anathematised.
Forgoing the boiling of beakers and the pouring of powders in his pharmacist’s den, Parmentier left off producing potions to make his case in the venerable French locale of the kitchen. But when his decision to address his potato cookbook of 1777 to the housewives of France failed to convince them of the potato’s worth, Parmentier decided to woo the court instead, taking aim at the very top. The top was currently Louis XVI, a fat, good-natured, and pious monarch who was easily the most conscientious, caring king the French had seen in two hundred years, and whose head was later to be sliced off for his pains. A strong supporter of science and a man deeply moved by the suffering of his famished people, Louis agreed to support Parmentier, and in 1785 offered him some land on which to experiment. Parmentier was soon throwing dinner parties with twenty different potato-based dishes on the menu..
