Potato

A botanical fruit family

Potatoes are nightshades — same family as tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers. The green parts of the plant (and any green patches on the tubers) contain solanine, a mildly toxic glycoalkaloid. Trim away green spots and any sprouted “eyes” before cooking.

High-starch vs. waxy

Potato cooking is dominated by one variable: starch content.

• High-starch (russet, Idaho) — fluffy, dry, absorbent. Best for mashing, baking, and frying.
• Medium-starch (Yukon Gold) — versatile workhorse for mash, gratin, and roasting.
• Waxy (red, fingerling, new potato) — moist, dense, holds its shape. Best for salads, soups, and dishes where intact pieces matter.

Mixing them often produces inferior results — boiled waxy potatoes for mash give a gluey paste; baked waxy potatoes are dense rather than fluffy.

A 16th-century globalization story

Spanish conquistadors brought the potato from the Andes to Europe in the late 16th century, but suspicion held back its adoption — many Europeans considered it ugly, alien, or even poisonous. By the 18th century, when Antoine-Augustin Parmentier (a French agricultural reformer) had popularized it, the potato was rapidly transforming European agriculture: it produced more calories per acre than grain, grew in marginal soils, and could be stored for months.

The Irish famine

When Phytophthora infestans (potato late blight) swept Europe in the 1840s, Ireland — heavily dependent on a single potato variety, the Lumper — lost over a million people to starvation and disease. Another two million emigrated. The famine reshaped Irish demographics permanently and serves as a textbook example of the dangers of monoculture.

A planet of varieties

There are over 4,000 named potato varieties, most still grown in Andean villages. The CIP (International Potato Center) in Peru maintains a gene bank of more than 7,000 wild and cultivated relatives — a hedge against future crop diseases.