At work today a colleague of mine mentioned, that not far from where we work the potato fields were now in full bloom, and the fields were covered with white and purple potato flowers. Obviously I had to see them so I took a small detour home :-).
Potatoes are a staple food here in Denmark - in all of Europe actually - and they are also one of my favorite foods. Potatoes are really versatile and you can make a wide range of delicious dishes using potatoes.
As I stood there looking at the large fields of potato plants in bloom, I got a bit curious about potatoes - I already knew they were not native to Europe, but I couldn't remember where they came from, so when I got home, I did a bit of googling.
Here's what I learned:
The first people to cultivate potatoes were the Indians in Peru around 8000 BC to 5000 BC, but the potato were not introduced in Europe until 1536 where Spanish Conquistadors conquered Peru. The Conquistadors brought the potato back home, and before the end of the 16th century, families of Basque sailors began to cultivate potatoes along the Biscay coast of northern Spain. In the rest of Europe however the potato were met with a lot resistance for a variety of reasons, from people thinking they were poisonous to people refusing to eat them because they weren’t mentioned anywhere in the Bible, and therefore it took nearly 4 decades for the potato to spread to the rest of Europe.
