Potatoes and the Irish
I've been reading Hannah Kent's The Good People which is a novel set in Ireland in 1825-6, a couple of decades before the potato famine - so it wasn't about that, and I'm not going to talk about that. But it was about poor people and there was a lot of potato eating going on which got me to thinking a bit about how they came to be so reliant on the potato that the famine occurred. I'm sure that everything she wrote about from a historical perspective was well researched.
The characters in the book were really poor, but they almost all seemed to have a cow or a goat that they milked, making butter from the milk, and they also kept chickens so they had eggs. A few of the better off ones had pigs so that there was also a bit of bacon. Then there were fish from the rivers and streams - eels were frequently mentioned, berries and nuts from the hedgerows, and hares from the fields. Doubtless there were rabbits too. There was a very hard winter in the story and the cows stopped producing much milk and the chickens did not lay much - but they didn't seem to give up completely. The oats seemed to be given to the horses and bread was barely mentioned. And yes they did eat potatoes - a lot of potatoes.
However, they didn't do much with the potatoes. They basically seemed to just cook them - I think boiled - and then just eat them, discarding the skins as they did so. Now why did they do that I wonder? After all nowadays we know that most of the goodness is in the skins. Anyway my point is that with milk and eggs and butter to hand you could concoct much better ways to eat them. But then I guess they didn't have the time or the energy. Although that said all those tasty potato dishes such as Gratin Dauphinois are originally peasant dishes. So somebody must have cooked them. And there was mention of selling the eggs and the milk to pay the rent, so maybe there wasn't much left for the families.
And what did they eat before potatoes anyway? Because we all know that we had no potatoes until the conquistadors brought them back from Peru. Well I looked it up and it seems that it was basically a dairy diet with oats. Meat and fish for the wealthier. They ate lots and lots of milk, from which they made a sort of soured drink, and they also ate lots and lots of butter. Which is a habit that continued after the introduction of the potato.
Potatoes were obviously eaten by the poor everywhere - Van Gogh's potato eaters attests to them being eaten in France, or the Low Countries (I'm not sure where) for a start. So why do we associate potatoes with the Irish in particular?
I think it must be because of the famine. When you rely on one crop and when that crop is diseased and cannot be used, then disaster ensues. And I guess most of the world learnt from that tragic lesson. You do wonder what happened to all that milk, all those eggs though. Just not enough of it I suppose.
I, like many Anglo-Saxons have Irish blood in me and I do love potatoes in any shape or form. We all blame it on the Irish ancestry (which is a bit remote - at least three generations back), but really probably almost everyone likes potatoes in some way - if only as chips. I wonder why because they really don't have a lot of taste do they? Maybe it's because they pick up on so many other tastes, and are so amazingly versatile. Just for an exercise you could try and think of all the things you could do with just potatoes, milk, butter and eggs. Maybe you should add cheese too because that comes from milk.
To finish - here is a picture I found, which rather sums up the book - one of whose central characters is an old woman living on her own in a mud hut. Here she is - eating her potatoes - taking off the skins. They threw them outside. There was a superstitious reason for doing that, but I cannot remember what it was now.
