THE POTATO | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jan 7, 1897

THE POTATO.

HOW MANY people are there who think they could not get along without that homely edible tuber, the potato. And yet among civilized races the potato is quite a recent food. “In 1596,” says the Thrice a Week World, “the first potato was planted in England, in Holborn, about the time that Sir Walter Raleigh was planting the first Irish potato at Youghal, near Cork. For two centuries the potato continued as a botanical curiosity. When first eaten it was a delicacy, sometimes roasted and steeped in sack, or baked with marrow and spices, or preserved and candied. When Parmentier developed the plant in France, Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette wore the flowers as ornaments. Frederick the Great had to force the Pomeranian farmers to plant potatoes by the fear of his soldiers. It was the famine of 1771-2 in Germany that demonstrated the value of the ‘tubers.’ The fact is that it has been only within the past century that the potato has risen in its prominence as an esculent, even in Ireland, the land of the ‘murphies.’”