Were I graced with the ability to sing, a prime candidare would be the tune Charles Trenet got famous for in the 40s and 50s, “ Douce France, doux pays de mon enfance etc. “. To me, those lyrics are best embodied in a dish, I deem it gastronomic, Gratin dauphinois. I learned how to make it, indeed as a child, from Madeleine Thuillier. This lovely, very hard-working and pious person owned the farm “ Le Château “, in Colombe; i.e., in the Terres Froides
region of the Dauphiné province — of which this yummy preparation is emblematic. And lengthy, given that the secret of its success is the slicing potatoes paper-thin. I spent in Colombe nearly all my school vacations, from age 7 until age 12.
Because it soaked up the heavy cream it was laced with, the potato vegetable melts away deliciously on the tongue. Ease of turning the tubercule — a rhyzome, technically — into thin slices gave us another delicacy, the potato chips. They appeared in English-language cookbooks during the first half of the nineteenth century and conquered the US a century later, with the rest of the world not far behind.
Improvement of bread served in hospitals and prisons, devising of new bread-making techniques, improvement likewise of sea biscuits, reform of the milling and bakery … The French military pharmacist Antoine Parmentier (1737-1813) had a life-long avocation, in making the daily diet more nutritious. It is also to him that we owe extraction of sugar from plants, from beets in particular, which remedied the shortage of sugar cane, following the
continental blockade established against the English by Napoleon I in 1806. We are also indebted to him for numerous works on food hygiene, cold preservation, and refrigeration of meats.
But Parmentier is remembered singly if unffairly for having popularized potatoes. In 1786, he presented the tuber to Louis XVI. The king was thrilled about these flowering stems, which he wore on his clothing, which Marie-Antoinette also adorned her hairstyle with. The royal couple tasted the tubercles, then nicknamed “parmentières”. As a consequence, Antoine
Parmentier was entrusted with two hectares in the Sablons plain, then on the outskirts of Paris, in Neuilly, to carry out a life-size experiment. This is the current location of both Jardin d’Acclimatation and the Louis Vuitton Foundation. Legend has it that he, cunningly, had the fields guarded by armed soldiers during the day … but not at night. Attracted and intrigued by
so many mysteries, the neighboring population came to steal the tubers and consume them. Transformed test: the adoption of potatoes was not long in coming.
But where does this vegetable originate ? What does the plant use this tubercule for ? What is the nutritive value ? Is it a difficult to raise crop ?
Potatoes originated in Peru, both much smaller than today’s potatoes and brightly colored. This cultivated crop diffused across the Andes at first and went on to conquer the world, in the process becoming bigger in size and
colorless. The tuber is a reserve of carbohydrates on which the rest of the plant depends for growth. Potatoes, in like manner to other plants, suffer from parasites. One of the best known is an insect, the doryphore, Leptinotarsa decemlineata. During the German occupation of France (1940-46), German soldiers became known to the French by the nickname, doryphores, since they preyed so much on our food resources. In my family, we nearly starved
at the time.
Which brings up anther historical episode. Islands have a difficult time coping with epidemics. From numerous cases, I’ll only mention : Malta (plague, 1813-4), Fiji (measles, 1875), Samoa (flu, 1918), Faeroe islands (measles, 1846). The utterly disastrous such event, as is well known, struck Ireland in mid-nineteenth century : a blight (Phytophthora infestans) struck the potato crop (1845-52) and famine ensued in the population : 1 million people were killed and 1 million emigrated, reducing the total population by one-quarter.