During the Seven Years War of the mid-1700s, a French army pharmacist named Antoine-Augustin
Parmentier was captured by Prussian soldiers.
As a prisoner of war, he was forced to live on rations of potatoes.
In mid-18th century France, this would practically qualify as cruel and unusual punishment: potatoes
were thought of as feed for livestock, and they were believed to cause leprosy in humans.
The fear was so widespread that the French passed a law against them in 1748.
But as Parmentier discovered in prison, potatoes weren’t deadly.
In fact, they were pretty tasty.
Following his release at the end of the war, the pharmacist began to proselytize to his
countrymen about the wonders of the tuber.
One way he did this was by demonstrating all the delicious ways it could be served, including
mashed.
By 1772, France had lifted its potato ban.
Centuries later, you can order mashed potatoes in dozens of countries, from fast food to
fine dining.
Hi, I’m Justin Dodd, and welcome to Food History, a new series from Mental Floss where
we dive deep into the amazing culinary stories that lead to the food on our plates.
If you have an idea for a food to explore in a future episode, leave it in the comments.
In the case of mashed potatoes, it’s a journey that takes 10,000 years and traverses the
mountains of Peru and the Irish countryside; it features cameos from Thomas Jefferson and
a food scientist who helped invent a ubiquitous snack food.
Before we get to them, though, let’s go back to the beginning.
Potatoes aren’t native to Ireland—or anywhere in Europe, for that matter.
They were most likely domesticated in the Andes mountains of Peru and northwest Bolivia,
where they were being used for food at least as far back as 8000 BCE.
These early potatoes were very different from the potatoes most of us know today.
They came in a variety of shapes and sizes and had a bitter taste that no amount of cooking
could get rid of.
They were also slightly poisonous.
To combat this toxicity, wild relatives of the llama would lick clay before eating them.
The toxins in the potatoes would stick to the clay particles, allowing the animals to
consume them safely.
Andeans noticed this and started dunking their potatoes in a mixture of clay and water—not
the most appetizing gravy, perhaps, but an ingenious solution to their potato problem.
Even today, when selective breeding has made most potato varieties safe to eat, some poisonous
varieties can still be bought in Andean markets, where they are sold alongside digestion-aiding
clay dust.
How cool is that?!
By the time Spanish explorers brought the first potatoes to Europe from South America
in the 16th century, they had been bred into a fully
edible plant.
It took them a while to catch on overseas, though.
By some accounts, European farmers were suspicious of plants that weren’t
mentioned in the Bible; others say it was the fact that potatoes grow from tubers, rather
than seeds.
Modern potato historians (known as tater-ologists in my potato fan fiction) debate these
points, though.
Cabbage’s omission from the Bible didn’t seem to hurt its popularity, and tulip
cultivation, using bulbs instead of seeds, was happening at the same time.
It may have just been a horticultural problem.
The South American climates potatoes thrived in were unlike those found in Europe, especially
in terms of hours of daylight in a day.
In Europe, potatoes grew leaves and flowers, which botanists readily studied, but the tubers
they produced remained small even after months of growing.
This particular problem began to be remedied when the Spanish started growing potatoes
on the Canary Islands, which functioned as a sort of middle ground between equatorial
South America and more northerly European climes.
It’s worth pointing out, though, that there is some evidence for the cultural concerns
I mentioned earlier.
There are clear references to people in the Scottish Highlands disliking that potatoes
weren’t mentioned in the bible, and customs like planting potatoes on Good Friday and
sometimes sprinkling them with holy water suggest some kind of fraught relationship
to potato consumption.
They were becoming increasingly common, but not without controversy.
As time went on, concerns about potatoes causing leprosy severely damaged their reputation.
A handful of potato advocates, including our boy Parmentier, were able to turn its image
around.
In her 18th-century recipe book The Art of Cookery, English author Hannah Glasse instructed
readers to boil potatoes, peel them, put them into a saucepan, and mash them well with milk,
butter, and a little salt . In the United States, Mary Randolph published a recipe for
mashed potatoes in her book, The Virginia Housewife.
Randolph’s recipe calls for half an ounce of butter and a tablespoon of milk for a pound
of potatoes.
Clearly insufficient, in the eyes of this Virginia housewife.
But no country embraced the potato like Ireland.
The hardy, nutrient-dense food seemed tailor-made for the island’s harsh winters.
And wars between England and Ireland likely accelerated its adaptation there; since the
important part grows underground, it has a better chance of surviving military activity.
Irish people also liked their potatoes mashed, often with cabbage or kale in a dish known
as colcannon.
Potatoes were more than just a staple food there; they became part of the Irish identity.
But the miracle crop came with a major flaw: It’s susceptible to disease, particularly
potato late blight, or Phytophtora infestans.
When the microorganism invaded Ireland in the 1840s, farmers lost their livelihoods
and many families lost their primary food source.
The Irish Potato Famine killed a million people, or an eighth of the country’s population.
The British government, for its part, offered little support to its Irish subjects.
One unexpected legacy of the Potato Famine was an explosion in agricultural science.
Charles Darwin became intrigued by the problem of potato blight on a humanitarian and scientific
level; he even personally funded a potato breeding program in Ireland.
His was just one of many endeavors.
Using potatoes that had survived the blight and new South American stock, European agriculturists
were eventually able to breed healthy, resilient potato strains and rebuild the crop’s numbers.
This development spurred more research into plant genetics, and was part of a broader
scientific movement that included Gregor Mendel’s groundbreaking work with garden peas.
I never thought I would use the word “groundbreaking” and “peas” in the same sentence, but,
here we are.
Around the beginning of the 20th century, a tool called a ricer started appearing in
home kitchens.
It’s a metal contraption that resembles an oversized garlic press, and it has nothing
to do with making rice.
When cooked potatoes get squeezed through the tiny holes in the bottom of the press,
they’re transformed into fine, rice-sized pieces.
The process is a lot less cumbersome than using an old-fashioned masher, and it yields
more appetizing results.
Mashing your potatoes into oblivion releases gelatinized starches from the plant cells
that glom together to form a paste-like consistency.
If you’ve ever tasted “gluey” mashed potatoes, over-mashing was likely the culprit.
With a ricer, you don’t need to abuse your potatoes to get a smooth, lump-free texture.
Some purists argue that mashed potatoes made this way aren’t really mashed at all—they’re
riced—but I’m not one to let pedantry get in the way of delicious carbohydrates.
And if mashed potato pedants have opinions about ricers, they’ll definitely have something
to say about this next development.
In the 1950s, researchers at what is today called the Eastern Regional Research Center,
a United States Department of Agriculture facility outside of Philadelphia, developed
a new method for dehydrating potatoes that led to potato flakes that could be quickly
rehydrated at home.
Soon after, modern instant mashed potatoes were born.
It’s worth pointing out that this was far from the first time potatoes had been dehydrated.
Dating back to at least the time of the Incas, “chuño” is essentially a freeze-dried
potato created through a combination of manual labor and environmental conditions.
The Incas gave it to soldiers and used it to guard against crop shortages.
Experiments with industrial drying were gearing up in the late 1700s, with one 1802 letter
to Thomas Jefferson discussing a new invention where you grated the potato, pressed all the
juices out and the resulting cake could be kept for years.
When rehydrated it was “like mashed potatoes” according to the letter.
Sadly, the potatoes had a tendency to turn into purple, astringent tasting cakes.
Interest in instant mashed potatoes resumed during the Second World War period, but those
versions were a soggy mush or took forever.
It wasn’t until the ERRC’s innovations in the 1950s that a palatable dried mashed
potato could be produced.
One of the key developments was finding a way to dry the cooked potatoes much faster,
minimizing the amount of cell rupture and therefore the pastiness of the end-product.
These potato flakes fit perfectly into the rise of so-called convenience foods at the
time, and helped potato consumption rebound in the 1960s after a decline in prior years.
Instant mashed potatoes are a marvel of food science, but they’re not the only use scientists
found for these new potato flakes.
Miles Willard, one of the ERRC researchers, went on to work in the private sector, where
his work helped contribute to new types of snacks using reconstituted potato flakes,
including …drumroll, please…Pringles!
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Until then, keep your elbows off the table.