Mashed Potatoes

As humans gather around Thanksgiving tables in late fall, their feasts often include a common palette of foodstuffs, from turkey to corn to cranberry sauce to pumpkin pie.

Uncle Jimmy might put a personal spin on a dish, but, odds are, he’s making it with a traditional ingredient list. Most years, Uncle Jimmy whips up a batch of mashed potatoes. Sometimes he enlivens the side with garlic, sour cream, or heaps of butter, but the potatoes are a holiday staple.

And don’t forget the gravy.

How long have we been munching on potatoes? And how did the potato end up a ubiquitous Thanksgiving food?

The potatoes we eat are just part of a plant, scientifically named Solanum tuberosum. Members of the nightshade family, the genus Solanum is also home to tomatoes and eggplants (aubergine). The species name tuberosum comes from the Latin tuber, which means “lump, bump, or swelling.”

Tubers are bumps or swellings that develop underground in certain plants. They are not roots but more akin to organs that store energy and nutrients. Potatoes are the tubers of Solanum tuberosum.

Though we often think of potatoes as bland food – both in taste and color – the tubers can appear in a variety of colors and culitvars.

Today, wild potato species range across two continents, from the southern United States to southern Chile.

Geneticists have determined that cultivated potatoes developed from a single species in southern Peru and northwestern Bolivia. In this location, between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago, humans realized the tuber’s nutritional value, and we’ve been eating them ever since. A nice source of calories, potatoes pack vitamin B6, while also containing C and other B-complex vitamins.

The English word “potato” comes from the Spanish patata, which derived from the Taíno term batata. Now extinct, this language was the most commonly spoken in the Caribbean when the Spanish arrived. In Taíno, batata means “sweet potato.” The Spanish introduced other parts of the world to potatoes circa 1570 during the Columbian Exchange. Many European languages display the lateness of the potato’s arrival in their tongues, calling them “apples of the Earth.” In French, for example, a potato is a pomme de terre; apples are pommes en francais.

Though the potato was now grown worldwide, it did not become popular in Europe until approximately 1750. After widespread adoption, spuds became one of the driving forces in population growth; some estimates place the potato as the cause for up to a quarter of the Old World’s gains between 1700 and 1900. By the mid-1800s, the potato was center stage, as a blight caused the Great Irish Famine, displaying the importance of the tuber to entire nations.

When the Pilgrims left England, the Spanish had already gifted Europe with the potato. And, eventually, wild potatoes took hold in North America.

But had taters made it to New England by 1621, the traditional date of the first Pilgrim harvest festival?

That’s a big potatNO.

On the veggie side, onions, beans, lettuce, spinach, cabbage, carrots, and peas: yes. Raw, mashed, boiled, or fried potatoes: nope.

Though not prevalent in the early 17th century, the potato caught on around the world quickly afterward. Mashed potatoes first showed up as a recipe in 1747 in Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery.

Today, the world produces 376 million tonnes of the more than 5,000 varieties of potatoes each year. That’s over 820 billion pounds! The average American consumes 65 kilograms yearly (140+ pounds).

A good chunk of that comes at Thanksgiving, where mashed potatoes take a prominent spot on many plates. Even if the Pilgrims were not able to partake, the next time you give thanks around a mashed feast, recall that you are continuing a human tradition many millennia old!