This is like imagining Ireland before potatoes were brought back from the America’s, it’s impossible.
Fun bit about that - potatoes had a similar journey in continental Europe! The French thought they were disease-spreading and only good for animal feed, until the good doctor Parmentier was captured by the Prussians during wartime, who had recently begun experimenting with potato cultivation, and got fed a steady diet of potatoes while in captivity. Realizing that a prolonged period of time of eating potatoes had NOT killed him, he went on to advocate for its wider usage.
Food has fun history. Like the root rot that happened across France and Italy that almost wiped out the grape vineyards. They were saved by grafting some of them and transporting them to California, and then they found out the root systems in California were immune to the root rot occuring in France/Italy so they were able to move some of those plants back. Not saying that all of California’s wine comes from those grafted plants, but I wonder how much of an impact they had on turning California into the wine creators they are today.
Not even animal feed, the thing is when they introduced potatoes to farmers in France the farmers did what they usually do with the leaves of root vegetables: they gave it to their animals.
Except the potato leaves are poisonous, so after seeing that this unknown vegetable was killing their animals or making them sick they of course got rid of it and did not want to take risks with the roots themselves.
Now, I don’t know if it’s a legend or not but what Parmentier did to make farmers interested again is that he asked for a field of potato to be planted around Versailles and have it being guarded day and night. When the potatoes where ready the guards would start to be less careful and leaves the field unatendded for some period that left the opportunity for peasants to grab this delicious crop that the king was protecting.
The French put up potatoe fields guarded by the military, but the soldiers were instructed to not catch anyone trying to steal the potato plants. Thus making people think it was valuable, and cultivate it.
In sweden they introduced it, people cultivated it but ate the leafs and got sick so they went on a rampage to kill the persons who had introduced them to potatoes.
BTW the Hachis Parmentier is a dish named after Parmentier and it’s delicious!
Fun bit about that - potatoes had a similar journey in continental Europe! The French thought they were disease-spreading and only good for animal feed, until the good doctor Parmentier was captured by the Prussians during wartime, who had recently begun experimenting with potato cultivation, and got fed a steady diet of potatoes while in captivity. Realizing that a prolonged period of time of eating potatoes had NOT killed him, he went on to advocate for its wider usage.
Food has fun history. Like the root rot that happened across France and Italy that almost wiped out the grape vineyards. They were saved by grafting some of them and transporting them to California, and then they found out the root systems in California were immune to the root rot occuring in France/Italy so they were able to move some of those plants back. Not saying that all of California’s wine comes from those grafted plants, but I wonder how much of an impact they had on turning California into the wine creators they are today.
Not even animal feed, the thing is when they introduced potatoes to farmers in France the farmers did what they usually do with the leaves of root vegetables: they gave it to their animals.
Except the potato leaves are poisonous, so after seeing that this unknown vegetable was killing their animals or making them sick they of course got rid of it and did not want to take risks with the roots themselves.
Now, I don’t know if it’s a legend or not but what Parmentier did to make farmers interested again is that he asked for a field of potato to be planted around Versailles and have it being guarded day and night. When the potatoes where ready the guards would start to be less careful and leaves the field unatendded for some period that left the opportunity for peasants to grab this delicious crop that the king was protecting.
The French put up potatoe fields guarded by the military, but the soldiers were instructed to not catch anyone trying to steal the potato plants. Thus making people think it was valuable, and cultivate it.
In sweden they introduced it, people cultivated it but ate the leafs and got sick so they went on a rampage to kill the persons who had introduced them to potatoes.
BTW the Hachis Parmentier is a dish named after Parmentier and it’s delicious!
For anyone curious about Hachis Parmentier:
It’s shepherds pie but french. That is all.
Also, it’s delicious, much like shepherds pie
I always thought that was some German King with the “guarded” patches.
I might be wrong, learned it here in France, any potato historians out there?
The same story is definitely told about Frederick the Great, who put great effort into cultivating the potato in Prussia.