Back Home by Chris Hardie
Most weeks this column focuses on a single topic, but sometimes it’s a mashup, blending two or more different themes into a perfect puree of prose.
You never know what I will dig up or what my fried tiny gray cells will find appealing. At the risk of beating the starch out of the topic, this week I am cooking up a column about potatoes.
Most folks think of Idaho or Washington when it comes to spuds, but Wisconsin holds its own. The state consistently ranks third in the country in potato production, with 67,000 acres of plantings and nearly 3 billion pounds.
According to PotatoGoodness.com, the crop was first cultivated more than 8,000 years ago by Inca Indians and other South American indigenous cultures. Along with being a primary food crop, potatoes were also used as an art form by the Moche culture, who collected malformed examples. Some of them reportedly look like my nose.
The Spanish conquistadors of the 1500s brought potatoes to Europe, where they were initially viewed with suspicion and were called the devil’s apples because they were thought to be poisonous, being a member of the nightshade family. It wasn’t until Ronald McDonald from Scotland and Burger King Louis started deep-frying them that the French aristocrats accepted them as a viable food product.
OK, so French fries really didn’t start that way, but it is true that King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette wore purple and pink potato blossoms that helped popularize the crop.
We grow potatoes in our garden every year. While they are ready for harvest by mid-summer, my preponderance for procrastination means I normally wait until fall when all of the dried up vines have disappeared. That makes the task twice as hard because I have to guess where the tubers are buried and it’s more of an exploratory mission.
This year I tried something different. We had a lot of potatoes left from last year’s crop that were sprouting. I tilled one corner of the garden, planted potatoes in a fairly shallow furrow and then covered the entire area with three to four inches of old hay.
The new plants poked through the mulch in a few weeks. We didn’t have any potato beetles to battle and the mulch kept the patch fairly weed-free.
Harvesting was much easier. I pulled away the mulch and some of the potatoes were right near the surface. Some didn’t even need persuasion from the digging fork. Less work and a better harvest. This working smarter concept feels strange.
While our harvest did not match that of the 1974 harvest of Eric Jenkins from England who had 370 pounds from a single plant, we did get a couple of boxes. We spread the potatoes to dry on a table and plan to create some cooler root cellar conditions in a basement room for longer term storage this year.
Potatoes today remain an important source of food. Smithsonian Magazine ranked the potato as the fifth most important crop worldwide, after wheat, corn, rice and sugar cane.
And thanks to the University of Wisconsin and NASA, in October 1995 the potato became the first vegetable to be grown in space. So that means that there could be lefse served on future long-term space flights if we get some Norwegian astronauts.
Fry them, bake them, broil them, rice them … make them anyway you like. If you boil it all down, I have dished up another fascinating, fact-filled, food-driven julienned feast for your reading enjoyment without the calories and weight of a heavy opus.
I know I’m getting a little chippy, and it may not be totally tub(er)alur, but it’s surely not small potatoes.
