Why Is The Potato An Integral Part Of The European Table?

2024 Author: Jasmine Walkman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 08:29

Every housewife uses potatoes to prepare very tasty dishes. But have you thought, dear ladies and gentlemen, who is to blame for him being at your table today?

Potatoes can be used for almost anything - as an insect poison, as a stain remover, as a dietary supplement and many other benefits have this vegetable. While we use it regularly, a long time ago Europeans did not even know it existed. The first tubers arrived in the old world in 1570.

The credit for this went to Spanish sailors from South America, where the potato was the main means of subsistence. And here again the British intervene. They claim that the credit for the appearance of the potatoes goes to an English navigator named Francis Drake. This statement was enriched over time and became a legend, which tells how Drake gave his friend potatoes, which he baked with butter and entertained the British Parliament.

Yes, but as they claim one thing, so they can refute it. His English work. The English encyclopedias themselves wrote that Drake could not have brought the potatoes to Europe because his ships never reached the shores of South America.

Also popular was the version that for the first time the potatoes were brought from Virginia back to England by a certain Walter Rumyff. But this version was also debunked by British encyclopedias, which say that potatoes were not known in Virginia at the time.

The potato was first described by a man named Pedro Ceza de Leon. He studied Peru in detail and wrote a book called The Chronicles of Peru. There he describes a potato as follows: “A special kind of peanuts. When cooked, they become as soft as roasted chestnuts. They are covered with skin no thicker than that of truffles. In his book, de Leon describes a special Indian holiday with which they celebrated the harvest of the potato crop.

You probably think that the potato quickly made its way to the heart of the then European. Yes, but it was not, because at that time people looked at new products with distrust.

Even the famine years, which were not uncommon in Europe at the time, did not make people eat potatoes. To change this, and seeing in potatoes a salvation from hunger, the Prussian Kaisers Wilhelm I and Wilhelm the Great issued a law obliging the population to eat potatoes.

In France, the potato was brought in 1616, but only in the second half of the XVIII century, the French began to grow it for food. The Parisian pharmacist Antoine Auguste had a special merit for this, who discovered that potatoes could be used to make starch, and for this discovery he received an award from the king for saving the people from starvation. At that time, even the Russians replaced the turnips they ate with potatoes.

This vegetable quickly became an essential product of all strata of Russian society. But, unfortunately, when the land in Russia was barren, which often happened, potatoes were the only livelihood for poor families. This is why the Russian proverb was invented: "Potatoes are a helper of bread."