THE POTATO AT HOME AND IN ENGLAND

When I was a small boy running about wild on the pampas, amazingly interested in everything and making wonderful discoveries every day, I was attracted by a small flower among the grasses--pale and meek-looking, with a yellow centre, petals faintly washed with purple, and a lovely scent. It charmed me with its gentle beauty and new fragrance, and surprised me with its resemblance, both in flower and leaf, to the potato-plant. On showing a spray to my parents, they told me that it _was_ a potato-flower. This seemed incredible, since the potato was a big plant with large clusters of purplish flowers, almost scentless, and, furthermore, it was a _cultivated_ plant. They explained that all cultivated plants were originally wild; that long cultivation had had the effect of changing their appearance and making them larger; that was how we had got our wheat, which came from a poor little grass with a seed scarcely bigger than a pin’s head. Even the botanists had had great difficulty in identifying it as the original wheat-plant. Also our maize and huge pumpkins and water-melons, and all our vegetables and fruit. I then took a table-knife and went to look for a plant, and when I found one I dug down to a depth of six inches, and there sure enough was the tuber, attached to the root, but quite small--not bigger than a hazel-nut--perfectly round with a pimply skin, curiously light-coloured, almost pearly. A pretty little thing to add to my collection of curios, but all the same a potato. How strange!

From that time I began to take a new interest in the potato, and would listen eagerly when the subject of potatoes was discussed at table. When the potatoes were taken up about the beginning of December, and then the second crop in autumn--April or May--my father would tell the gardener to pick out a few of the biggest for him, and these, when washed and weighed, would be placed as ornaments on the dining-room mantelpiece, in a row of half-a-dozen. They were not pretty to look at, but they were astonishingly big when I put my small marble of a wild potato by the side of them. Then when some English neighbour, ten or twenty miles away, would ride over to see us and stay to lunch, my father would take up the potatoes one by one and hand them to him and say: “What do you think of this one? And of this one?” Then: “And of _this_ one?” _This_ one would be the biggest. Then he would add: “What does _your_ biggest potato weigh?” And when the other replied: “Ten”--or perhaps twelve--“ounces,” my father would laugh and say: “This one weighs fourteen ounces and a half; this fifteen and three-quarters; this one just turns the balance at sixteen, and _this_ one seventeen ounces. What do you say to that?” The other would reply that he couldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen and handled the potato himself, and my father would be happy and triumphant.

Not only were the potatoes of that land as large as any in the world, but they were probably the best in the world to eat. They were beautifully white and mealy, with that crystalline sparkle of the properly cooked potato in them which one rarely sees in this country. Strange to say, our Spanish neighbours, even those who had a garden, did not grow or eat them; they were confined to the English settlers and a few foreigners of other nationalities.

Here I will venture to relate an incident which, though trivial, goes to show how little our native neighbours knew about the potato, which was so important to us; and at the same time it will serve to illustrate a trait common to the native of that land--the faculty of keeping his face.

A young girl of about twelve, the child of poor natives living in a small ranch a couple of miles from us, was invited by a little sister of mine to come and spend a day with her, to look at dolls and other treasures, eat peaches, and enjoy herself generally. We were a big family, but my sister’s little guest, Juanita, took her place at table as if to the manner born. Lamb cutlets with a nice big potato on the plate were placed before her, also a cup of tea, for in those days tea was drunk at every meal. After a glance round to see how eating was managed in these novel conditions, she began on the cutlets, and presently my little sister, anxious to guide her, called attention to the untasted potato. She looked at it, hesitated a moment, then, taking it up in her fingers, dropped it into her tea-cup! The poor girl had never seen a boiled potato before and had never had a cup of tea, and had just made a guess at what she was expected to do. We youngsters exploded with laughter and our elders smiled, but the girl kept her balance--not a flush, not a change in her countenance.

“Oh, you must not do that!” cried my sister. “You must eat the potato with the cutlet on the plate, with salt on it.”

And Juanita, turning towards her little hostess, replied in a quiet but firm tone: “I prefer to eat it this way.” And in _this_ way she did eat it, first mashing it up, stirring it about in the tea, making a sort of gruel of it, “not too thick and not too thin,” then eating it with a spoon.

This singular presence of mind and faculty of keeping their dignity under difficulties is, I imagine, an instinct of all uncivilised people, and is in some curious way related to the instinct of self-preservation, as when they are brought face to face with a great danger and are perfectly cool where one would expect them to be in a state of confusion and panic.

Other memories connected with the potato come back to me. I had a small brother, and one day we were discussing that most important subject to small boys, the things we liked best to eat, when it occurred to us as very strange that certain articles of food were only eaten in combination with certain other things; some with salt, and others with sugar, and so on, and we agreed to try and discover a new and better way of combining different flavours. We started on our boiled eggs and ate them with sugar or treacle and cinnamon instead of salt, and found that it wasn’t very nice. By and by we found that peaches cut up and eaten with cream and sugar tasted delicious. And after that we broke the peach-stones and made a mash of the kernels in a mortar and ate that with cream and sugar, and agreed that it was a great success. By and by one of our elders told us that the peculiar flavour of the peach-stone pip which delighted us and was so good with cream and sugar was due to the presence of prussic acid, and that if we went on with this dish it would certainly kill us all in a little while. That frightened us, and we started experimenting with the harmless potato. And here we met with our greatest success; let all gourmets make a note of it. Select a good-sized egg-shaped baked potato and place it in a small cup and treat it as you would an egg, cutting off the top. Then with your spoon break it up inside, pour in oil and vinegar, and add pepper and salt. A delightful combination! We tried to improve on it by substituting cream or butter for the oil, but it was the flavour of olive oil and vinegar combined with that of the potato which made it perfect.

Other experimenters may have discovered this way of eating a potato, but the only approach to it I have found in reading is contained in an anecdote of Byron, at the time when he was the hero of London society. He dined with a friend who had got together a company of the poet’s ardent admirers to meet him. But he was in a difficult mood: he declined soup and fish and meats of all kinds. “What then will you eat?” asked his host, getting impatient. “Oh, a potato,” said Byron. And when a big potato was put before him, he broke it up, drenched it in vinegar and ate it, and this was his dinner. And dinner over, he took himself off, to the deep disappointment of all those who had come to gaze and listen and worship.

“How long,” said one of them to his host, “will his lordship be able to keep this dietary?”

“How long--how long!” said his host. “As long as people think it worth while to pay any attention to what he eats.”

The story goes on to say that, quitting his friend’s house, the poet walked to his club in Piccadilly and told the waiter to bring him an underdone beef-steak. He had perhaps discovered that a potato drenched in vinegar was good as an appetiser, but he probably did not know how much better it would have been with the addition of oil.

The other most interesting memory of the potato refers to its chief enemy, an insect called in the vernacular _Bicho moro_--a blister-beetle or Cantharides, its full scientific name being _Epicauta adspersa_. Not every year but from time to time this pest would make its appearance in numbers, and invariably just when the potato-plant was at its best, when the bloom was coming. On a warm, still, bright day, when the sun began to grow hot, all at once the whole air would be filled with myriads of the small grey beetles, about twice as big as a house-fly, and the buzzing sound of their innumerable wings, and the smell they emit. It was something like the smell of the fire-fly when they are in swarms--a heavy musty and phosphorous smell in the fire-fly. The blister-beetle had the mustiness but not the phosphorus in its odour; in place of it there was another indescribable and disagreeable element, which perhaps came from that acrid or venomous principle in the beetle’s pale blood. Though we heartily detested it, the insect was not without a modest beauty, its entire oblong body being of a pleasing smoke grey, the wing-cases minutely dotted with black.

The sight and sound and smell of them would call forth a lamentation from all those who possessed a potato-patch and had rejoiced for weeks past in their little green plants with their green embossed leaves, since now there would be no potatoes for the table except very small ones, until the autumn crop, which would come along after the grey blister-fly had vanished like smoke from the earth after leaving his evil seed in it.

The beetle feeds on the leaves of solanaceous plants and prefers the potato above all others, so that when he comes in a slow-flying swarm over the potato-field, you see the beetles dropping in thousands like a grey rain upon it, and know that before the sun sets the whole of the leaves will be devoured, the stalks being left till the following day, when he will eat them pretty well down to the ground before passing on to attack the tomatoes. Attempts were sometimes made to drive them off by lighting smoky fires of half-dried weeds round the potato-patch, but never once did we succeed in saving the plants.

As a small boy I was naturally incapable of entering into the bitter feelings of our elders with regard to the blister-beetle. Its appearance excited me and had the exhilarating effect produced by any and every display of life on a great scale. At the same time I hated it, not because it devoured the potato-plants, but for the reason that I had been feelingly persuaded of its power to produce blisters. I was out running about in the sunshine all day, and the air being full of beetles, they were always dropping upon me and had to be brushed or shaken off my straw hat, my jacket and trousers and boots continually; but from time to time one would get into my shoe or slip down my neck or creep up my sleeve to get broken on the skin, and in due time a pain would set in just at that spot; then on pulling off my clothes a noble blister would come to light, a boss of a pale amber colour and a jelly-like appearance. It was ornamental but painful, and I would go sore for a day in that part.

Being a boy naturalist, I tried to discover the secret of its breeding habits and transformations, but failed utterly. However, they are known, and are like those of our familiar English oil-beetle, which stagger the mind that contemplates the strange case of a big beetle whose eggs produce mites--mere animated specks--endowed with an extraordinary activity and a subtle devilish knowledge and cunning in building up their own lives out of others’ lives. I did, however, succeed in discovering one singular fact when on this quest. There is a family of big rapacious flies common all over the world, the Asilidae, and we have several species on the pampas, some arrayed in the colours and markings of bees and wasps. One is black and has bright red instead of transparent wings, and appears to mimic our common red-winged wasp. I found out that this fly preyed on the blister-beetle, and it amazed me to see that almost every one of these flies I could find had one grasped in its feet and was diligently sucking its juices through its long proboscis. Yet those juices had so potent a poison in them that a few drops of them on a man’s skin would raise a big blister!

Although the potato was very much to me in those early years, all my feelings regarding it having originated in the chance discovery of the meek-looking little flower with a delicate perfume among the grasses, it grew to be more when I heard the history of the plant in cultivation, and how it had been used as food by the Aborigines both in North and South America for long centuries before the discovery of the great green continent, and just as the yellow-haired Demeter, the Corn Mother, and her loved lost daughter Persephone, the Corn Maiden, were worshipped in ancient Greece; and as the Rice Mother is worshipped in the East, in many lands and islands; and as the Maize Mother and God were worshipped in all the Americas, by nations savage and civilised, so did the Peruvians, who built temples glittering with gold to their chief god, the sun, and to the sun’s children, the lightning and rainbow, worship the Potato Mother, and pray to her to look kindly on their labours when the seed was committed to the ground and to give them good increase.

Finally I came to know the history of the introduction of the potato into these islands by Sir Walter Raleigh. This action served to make him appear to me the greatest of all the shining Elizabethans--greatest in all he thought, said, and did, good or evil; as courtier, poet, explorer and buccaneering adventurer and seeker after a golden city in savage wildernesses; as prisoner in the Tower and author of that most eloquent History of the World; and, most beautiful of all, on the scaffold, by the block, the headsman with his glittering axe standing by him, when, like a king who was to come after him, he nothing said or did on that memorable scene to cast a shadow on his lustre or cause any lover then and in the ages to follow to grieve at even a momentary weakness on his part.

All this served to make the potato so important to me that when I stood among the plants, growing higher than my knees, in their lush-green embossed leaves and purple bloom, with a cloud of red and black and yellow and orange and white butterflies hovering about them, it seemed to me that America had given the two greatest food-bearing plants to the world--maize and potato; and which was the greatest I could not say, although the great maize-plant was certainly the most beautiful in its green dress and honey-coloured tresses, which the hot sun would soon turn to gold and by and by to a Venetian red of a tint which one sees but rarely in his life, in the hair of some woman of almost supernatural loveliness.

The potato, then, as I have said before, was very much to me. How natural, then, when I came to England that I should have been shocked at the sight of my first dish of potatoes on the table.

“Is _this_ the way potatoes are cooked in this country?” I asked in astonishment.

“Why, yes; how else would you have them cooked?” I was asked in return; and they too were shocked when I said the sight of that sodden mass of flavourless starch and water made me sick--that it looked like the remains of a boiled baby in the dish, boiled to a rag. For up to then I had seen potatoes on the table as they appear when boiled in their skins, peeled, and placed in a large shallow dish with a little butter on them; and in that way they have the appearance of large cream-coloured fruit, and send out an agreeable smell and have a nice flavour.

Here was quite a different thing: this was the “homely potato” of the British journalist--homely indeed!--stripped of its romance, spoiled in the cooking, and made nasty to the eye. Yet this is how it is eaten in every house in England! In Ireland and Scotland I found that the potato was usually cooked in the proper way by people of the peasant class. But what do the doctors, who make our digestions their life study, say of this misuse of the potato? I don’t know. All I hear them say about the potato is that if your digestion is bad you must not eat it. What, then, will they say when I tell them that I have a weak digestion, and whenever I have a bad turn I cure myself by dining for a day or two on nothing but potatoes? Cooked in their skins, I scarcely need add, and eaten with pepper and salt and butter. No soup or fish or meats or sweets--nothing but potatoes for a day or two and I’m well again. Perhaps they will say that I am not a normal subject. But we needn’t bother about the doctors. Just now, while writing this chapter, I asked my landlady’s daughter in the village in Cornwall where I am staying if she had ever tasted a potato boiled in its jacket. Yes, she had, once only, and didn’t like it because it didn’t taste like a potato--such a funny flavour!

That “funny” flavour, so unlike the taste of the tuber boiled and water-logged in the homely English way, is precisely the flavour which makes it so nice to eat and so valuable as food; also, if I may slip in the personal pathology or idiosyncratic abnormality, so perfect a cure for indigestion. It is, in fact, the taste imparted by the salts which mostly lie close beneath the skin, and are consequently thrown away when the potato is peeled before boiling. You cannot avoid this waste by scraping your potato, since scraping removes the waterproof skin, and, the skin gone, the boiling water saturates the potato and carries the salts away.

This is a serious matter in these days, when--as some of the newspapers say--we are trying to economise in the matter of food, and when the potato is beginning to be talked about. I suppose that there are about thirty or forty millions of us who consume about half a pound of potatoes every day; and it is not only the case that hundreds of tons of excellent food are thrown away every day in the peeling process, but that the most valuable elements in the potato are wasted. Perhaps the war will teach us to value the potato properly, as, I believe, it is and always has been valued in most countries outside these islands.