94 Fun Facts About Potato

In which part of the world were potatoes first domesticated?

South America: Andean farmers bred the potato from wild species too bitter to eat, and it reached Europe only after the Spanish conquest of the Incas in the 16th century.

What is the scientific name for the common cultivated potato?

Solanum tuberosum: growers plant its tubers rather than seed, so each variety is a clone of its parent, and that lack of genetic diversity leaves popular varieties open to the same pests and diseases.

Which French queen is said to have worn potato blossoms to make the crop fashionable?

Marie Antoinette: she and Louis XVI are said to have worn the flowers after the pharmacist Parmentier gave them a bouquet, part of his campaign to win respect for a plant the French fed to hogs.

Which country grows about a quarter of the world's potatoes?

China: it grew roughly 95 million of the world's 375 million tonnes in 2022, ahead of India, although the crop reached China only in the late Ming dynasty, about four centuries ago.

The potato blight behind Ireland's Great Famine was caused by what type of organism?

A water mould, Phytophthora infestans, is an oomycete: it looks and behaves like a fungus but belongs to a separate lineage, and it thrives in cool, wet weather.

Who is traditionally credited with inventing the potato chip in Saratoga Springs, New York?

George Crum: the story has the Moon's Lake House cook slicing potatoes paper-thin in 1853 to spite a fussy diner, but printed recipes for fried potato slices predate it by decades.

Boiled potatoes supply about 14% of the daily value of which nutrient?

Vitamin C: a boiled potato supplies about 14% of the daily value, and the spread of the crop is credited with making scurvy rare in places such as Scotland, where it had once been endemic.

Where in a potato plant does solanine, a natural toxin, build up to unsafe levels?

The sprouts and greened parts carry solanine, the plant's natural defence: light turns tuber skins green while raising the toxin, and leaves and stems carry it too.

Which type of potato, higher in starch, suits baking and fluffy mash?

Floury potatoes such as Russets hold more starch, so they cook up dry and light, while waxy boiling potatoes, with less, keep their shape.

What is the transfer of crops like potatoes between the Americas and the Old World called?

Columbian exchange: the potato went east with it and, by one estimate, accounts for about a quarter of the Old World's growth in population between 1700 and 1900.

In which city was the earliest known recipe for potato chips published, in 1817?

London: William Kitchiner's The Cook's Oracle, published there in 1817, gave a recipe for potatoes fried in slices or shavings, more than three decades before the Saratoga Springs legend.

Overcrowded vessels carrying emigrants from famine-struck Ireland in the 1840s earned what grim nickname?

Coffin ships: the blight that struck in 1845 drove more than a million people to emigrate, many in cheap, badly provisioned vessels on which deaths at sea were common.

A potato grows underground but is not a root: botanically, the tuber is a swollen what?

Stem: the tuber is the thickened tip of an underground stem called a stolon, which is why it carries 'eyes' — buds that grow into new shoots.

Roughly how many potato varieties exist worldwide?

About 5,000: most are native Andean types, a gene pool breeders draw on for resistance to pests, disease and harsh weather.

Which fried pastry, a street-food staple across South Asia, is classically stuffed with spiced potato and peas?

Samosa: the pastry reached India from Central Asia and the Middle East, and a poet at the Delhi court around 1300 described it filled with meat, long before any potato had crossed the Atlantic.

In 1748 the Paris parlement banned potato growing because the crop was thought to cause what?

Leprosy: the 1748 ban on the crop as a suspected cause of the disease stayed on the books until 1772, when Parmentier's campaign got potatoes declared edible.

The French potato champion Parmentier first lived on the crop while doing what?

Sitting in a Prussian prison: captured in the Seven Years' War, Parmentier was fed potatoes, a crop Frederick II had ordered his peasants to grow, and came home convinced they were fit to eat.

Legend says pommes soufflées, puffed potato slices, were born in 1837 because what ran late?

An inaugural train: the tale has chef Collinet's half-cooked slices going back into the oil, and puffing up, when the royal party arrived late from opening a railway near Paris; historians dispute it.

Which US president served 'potatoes in the French manner' at a White House dinner in 1802?

Thomas Jefferson, who acquired a taste for French cooking as minister to France, served 'potatoes in the French manner' at a White House dinner in 1802.

Until 1990, McDonald's fried its French fries in a mixture that was 93% what?

Beef tallow: McDonald's cooked its fries in 93% beef tallow and 7% cottonseed oil until 1990, then switched to vegetable oil with added beef flavouring.

Which neighbour of France has long disputed its claim to have invented French fries?

Belgium: a popular Belgian story has villagers on the River Meuse frying potato strips in place of small fish when the river froze, though one Belgian food historian concludes fries began in France.

A Saratoga Springs cook reputedly invented potato chips in 1853 to spite a customer complaining his fries were what?

Too thick and soggy: the legend has a diner sending back the cook's fries as too thick, so he sliced them wafer-thin — yet printed recipes for fried potato slices predate 1853 by decades.

Which copper sulphate and lime spray, first used on vines, became the standard blight treatment?

Bordeaux mixture: botanist Pierre Millardet noticed that roadside vines sprayed with it to deter passers-by from eating the grapes escaped mildew; he published it in 1885 and it was soon turned on potato blight.

Which comedian voiced Mr. Potato Head in the first three Toy Story films?

Don Rickles: the insult comic voiced the grumpy spud from 1995 to 2010, and the fourth film, made after his death, built the part from his unused recordings.

The worst year of Ireland's Great Famine became known by what nickname?

Black '47: 1847 was the famine's deadliest year as fever followed starvation; about a million died and more than a million emigrated between 1845 and 1852.

Which English adventurer is popularly credited with bringing both potatoes and tobacco to Britain?

Walter Raleigh: legend credits him with bringing home both, but historians doubt it, since potatoes and tobacco were already known in Europe through the Spanish.

Which doctrine, embraced by the Whig government that took office in 1846, curtailed famine relief in Ireland?

Laissez-faire economics: the new Whig ministry assumed the market would supply food, so it halted its predecessor's relief works and refused to interfere with food leaving Ireland.

In 1952 Mr. Potato Head became the first toy to be what?

Advertised on television: the first commercial ever made for a toy aired in 1952, when children still pushed the plastic parts into a real potato; a plastic body arrived in 1964.

Before Hasbro bought the idea, Mr. Potato Head's face parts were meant as prizes in boxes of what?

Breakfast cereal: inventor George Lerner sold his push-in face parts to a cereal maker as box prizes, and the Hassenfeld brothers, later Hasbro, bought the rights to launch the toy in 1952.

To which plant group does the sweet potato belong?

The morning glories: the sweet potato sits in the family Convolvulaceae, so it is only a distant relative of the nightshade-family potato and more distant still from true yams.

The French heirloom potato Vitelotte is prized for flesh of what colour?

Purple: the violet-blue flesh under Vitelotte's near-black skin gets its colour from anthocyanins, the natural pigments behind red and blue potato varieties.

Poutine, Canada's fries-and-gravy dish, emerged in the 1950s in which province?

Quebec: one claim traces it to Warwick in 1957, where restaurateur Fernand Lachance is said to have warned that fries and curds in one bag would make 'une maudite poutine', a damned mess.

Which spirit is traditionally distilled from fermented potatoes as well as grain?

Vodka: grain came first, and distillers in Poland and Russia could turn to potatoes only after the crop took hold in Europe in the 18th century.

Which stretchy dish from France's Aubrac plateau is made by beating mashed potato with fresh tomme and garlic?

Aligot: monks on the Aubrac are said to have served it to pilgrims bound for Santiago de Compostela, first as a soup of bread and fresh tomme; potatoes took the bread's place later.

Vichyssoise is a chilled, creamy soup of potatoes and which other vegetable?

Leeks: French-born chef Louis Diat created it at New York's Ritz-Carlton in the early 1900s by chilling the hot leek and potato soup that is a staple of French home cooking.

Which plant breeder raised the 1870s seedling behind America's classic russet baking potato?

Luther Burbank: he sold the rights to his potato for $150 and spent the money on the journey from Massachusetts to California, where he bred plants for the next half-century.

The International Potato Center, known as CIP, is based in which city?

Lima: the Centro Internacional de la Papa, founded there in 1971, teamed up with NASA in 2015 to test whether potatoes could grow in a simulated Martian environment.

The saddle shape of a Pringles chip is known mathematically as what?

A hyperbolic paraboloid: the uniform saddle lets the chips stack in a can, and science-fiction author Gene Wolfe, then a Procter & Gamble engineer, helped develop the machine that cooks them.

Fredric Baur, who designed the Pringles can, made what request of his family before he died in 2008?

To be buried in one: Baur was so proud of the tube he devised for stacking chips that, as he had asked, his children placed part of his ashes in a Pringles can.

Tater tots were invented in 1953 by Ore-Ida's founders as a way to use what?

Leftover potato slivers: Ore-Ida's founders chopped the scraps from fry cutting, mixed in flour and seasoning and pushed the mash through holes; the tots reached shops in 1956.

The 'hash' in hash browns comes from the French word hacher, meaning what?

To chop: the dish was 'hashed browned potatoes' in the 1880s, and the name was clipped to hash browns in the 20th century, dropping its -ed just as mash potatoes did.

The Taíno word batata, root of the Spanish patata, actually named which different plant?

The sweet potato: batata named that plant, the first of the two to reach Europe and grown in Spain by the mid-1500s; the word then passed to the Andean tuber that followed.

Hachis Parmentier is the French cousin of which British dish?

Shepherd's pie: the French version of minced meat under mashed potato honours Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, whose name cooks attached to potato dishes from the 1870s for having persuaded France to eat them.

Which 'new' potato is a famous speciality of a Channel Island?

Jersey Royal: the variety goes back to one outsized potato with 15 eyes that farmer Hugh de la Haye and his friends cut up and planted on a steep Jersey slope around 1880.

Why was the 'Lenape' potato, released in 1967, withdrawn from sale in 1970?

It was too toxic: a breeder who ate Lenape felt nauseated, and tests found exceptionally high levels of glycoalkaloids such as solanine, the natural toxins that protect potatoes from pests.

In Iroquois mythology, the first potatoes grew from which part of Earth Woman after she died?

Her feet: in the Iroquois telling, Earth Woman died giving birth to the twins Sapling and Flint, and the first potatoes are said to have grown from her feet.

A 1567 receipt, the earliest written record of potatoes outside the Americas, shows a shipment from Gran Canaria to which port?

Antwerp: the receipt, dated 28 November 1567, shows the Canary Islands were already exporting potatoes, a few years before the first trace of the crop in mainland Spain.

In 1992 which US vice president wrongly told a 12-year-old to add an 'e' to 'potato' at a spelling bee?

Dan Quayle: at a school in Trenton, New Jersey, he changed William Figueroa's correct spelling to 'potatoe', later saying he had trusted a card the school supplied with the misspelling.

Which potato dish was among the few foods Britain kept off the ration in both world wars?

Fish and chips: the government safeguarded supplies of fish and potatoes through both wars and left the dish unrationed, which only deepened its hold on the national diet.

The nickname 'spud' comes from a 15th-century word for what kind of object?

A short knife or dagger: 'spudde' went on to name a small digging spade and then anything short and thick, and by 1840 the word had landed on the potato.

After flowering, potato plants produce small fruits that look like what?

Green cherry tomatoes: the fruits are small berries packed with seeds, and unlike the tubers below ground they are poisonous.

Which British dish is a fry-up of leftover potato and cabbage?

Bubble and squeak: the name echoes the sounds of the frying pan, and the early versions were built on cooked beef and cabbage; potato became a main ingredient only by the mid-20th century.

DNA analysis shows over 99% of modern potato varieties descend from a lowland subspecies native to which country?

Chile: its lowland subspecies was adapted to the long summer days of high latitudes, unlike the highland potatoes of the tropical Andes, which evolved under short days.

Vada pav, a spiced potato fritter in a bread roll, is the signature street snack of which Indian city?

Mumbai: Ashok Vaidya is often credited with opening the first stall outside Dadar railway station in 1966, selling a cheap, quick meal to the city's cotton-mill workers.

Which artist painted The Potato Eaters, an 1885 scene of Dutch peasants?

Vincent van Gogh: he painted it at Nuenen and gave the family coarse faces and bony hands to show they had 'tilled the earth themselves with these hands they are putting in the dish'.

Monsanto's 'New Leaf' GM potato used which bacterium's genes against the Colorado beetle?

Bacillus thuringiensis: the NewLeaf potato carried a Bt gene whose protein kills Colorado beetle larvae; McDonald's, Burger King and Frito-Lay refused GM potatoes, and Monsanto dropped the line in 2001.

Which accessory did Mr. Potato Head give up for good in 1987?

His pipe: as 'Spokespud' for the Great American Smokeout he handed it to US Surgeon General C. Everett Koop in Washington, and the toy has been sold without one since.

East German propaganda claimed the Colorado beetles infesting its potato fields had been dropped by what?

American planes were the official culprit for the 'Yankee beetle', a handy Cold War scapegoat when almost half the Soviet zone's potato fields were infested by 1950.

Chuño, the Andean potato product eaten by Inca soldiers, is preserved by what process?

Natural freeze-drying on the Altiplano: potatoes are left out to freeze at night and dry by day, then trampled by foot to squeeze out water and skins.

The 'Röstigraben' is a nickname for the divide between which two parts of Switzerland?

German- and French-speaking Switzerland are split by the 'rösti ditch', which casts the grated-potato dish as emblematic of the Swiss-German side as opposed to the Latin one.

Hasselback potatoes take their name from a restaurant in which city?

Stockholm: the Hasselbacken restaurant, whose name means 'hazel slope', served the fan-sliced potatoes in 1953, though a Swedish cookbook of 1929 already had a similar recipe.

The Yukon Gold potato was bred not in the Yukon but at a university in which Canadian province?

Ontario: Gary Johnston bred it at the University of Guelph in 1966, after a graduate student from Latin America told him of the yellow-fleshed potatoes of home; it reached growers around 1980.

Pringles' makers went to court in Britain to argue the snack was no potato crisp, hoping to escape which tax?

Value added tax: Procter & Gamble pointed to a potato content of just 42% and a High Court judge agreed in 2008, but a year later the Court of Appeal ruled Pringles were crisps after all.

Which mild Thai curry, shaped by Persian and Indian cooking, is classically made with potatoes and peanuts?

Massaman curry: the dish blends Persian, Indian and Malay spices with Thai ingredients, and its Muslim roots are why it is usually made with chicken or beef and only rarely with pork.

Which company bought Pringles from Procter & Gamble in 2012 for about $2.7 billion?

Kellogg's stepped in after a $2.35 billion sale to Diamond Foods fell apart, and the purchase made it, at the time, the world's second-largest snack company.

Which slogan did Lay's introduce shortly after the 1961 Frito-Lay merger?

Betcha can't eat just one: Bert Lahr, the Cowardly Lion of The Wizard of Oz, delivered the dare in a run of 1960s TV commercials, turning up in a different costume each time.

In 2019 which snack giant sued farmers in India for growing a potato variety it had registered?

PepsiCo: its Indian arm sued four small farmers in Gujarat over the variety it grows for Lay's chips, then offered to settle within weeks as farmers' groups urged the government to step in.

Ireland's Tayto pioneered seasoned crisps in 1954 with which flavour?

Cheese and onion: owner Joe 'Spud' Murphy is credited with the world's first seasoned crisps, and the heads of big foreign crisp makers were soon calling to buy the rights to his technique.

Potato latkes are fried in oil as a traditional food of which Jewish festival?

Hanukkah: the frying recalls the Temple lamp said to have burned for eight days on a single day's oil, which is why the festival's foods, latkes and doughnuts alike, are cooked in it.

At a Burns supper, haggis comes with tatties and neeps, the Scots name for which mashed vegetable?

Swede: at the supper, held around the poet's birthday on 25 January, the haggis is carried in with ceremony and Burns's 'Address to a Haggis' is recited before it is served with its two mashes.

An early mashed-potato recipe appears in which author's 1747 cookbook The Art of Cookery?

Hannah Glasse: early editions hid her name behind the words 'By a Lady', and it reached the title page only in 1751, four years after the book first appeared.

Pommes Anna, created at the Café Anglais in Second Empire Paris, bakes thin potato slices in a great deal of what?

Butter: chef Adolphe Dugléré's cake of layered slices is turned over during cooking; it is said to honour a Paris beauty named Anna, though accounts differ on which one.

Lefse, a soft flatbread often made with potato, is a tradition of which country?

Norway: the dough is rolled thin and cooked on a griddle, and the finished lefse is the traditional partner of lutefisk, with the fish often rolled up inside it like a wrap.

Before potatoes reached Eastern Europe, Ashkenazi latkes were usually made from what?

Cheese: cheese pancakes were probably the usual Ashkenazi latke until the 19th century, eaten in memory of Judith, who in legend fed an enemy general salty cheese and wine before beheading him.

An old Irish rhyme warns that if you can't make boxty, you'll never get what?

'You'll never get a man', the rhyme goes, so a husband hinged on boxty: a griddle pancake of finely grated raw potato from Leitrim, Cavan and neighbouring counties.

Which variety's dominance before the famine of the 1840s left the potato crop so exposed to blight?

Lumper: prized for its enormous yields, it was planted so widely that the crop had too little genetic variety to hold back the blight.

In 1847, $170 for Irish famine relief came from a group of which Native American nation?

Choctaw: they had been forced along the Trail of Tears only 16 years earlier, and a steel sculpture of nine eagle feathers, Kindred Spirits, now honours the gift in Midleton, County Cork.

The maize Britain's PM secretly bought from America in 1845 earned what Irish nickname?

Peel's brimstone: Robert Peel's government bought the Indian corn in secret, but Irish mills were not equipped to grind the hard kernels; the meal's sulphur-yellow colour did the rest.

At which palace is Frederick the Great buried, his grave slab strewn with potatoes by visitors?

Sanssouci: Frederick was reburied on the palace terrace at Potsdam in 1991, as he had wished, and visitors leave potatoes on the slab in thanks for his promotion of the crop.

As Napoleon's inspector-general of health, the potato champion Parmentier had the French army adopt what?

Smallpox vaccination: the English doctor Edward Jenner had published the technique only in 1798, yet Napoleon had his troops vaccinated while France was at war with Britain.

The potato cannon traces its origins to the Holman Projector, a WWII weapon of what kind?

A naval anti-aircraft gun: the Holman Projector used compressed air or steam to lob grenades at aircraft from British merchant ships, and tales of crews firing spuds earned it the name 'potato thrower'.

Doing what to a potato first boosts the power of a potato battery?

Boiling it: Hebrew University researchers found in 2010 that eight minutes in the pot breaks down the flesh's resistance to the flow of current, lifting a potato battery's output about tenfold.

Legend credits Carlist general Tomás de Zumalacárregui with inventing which dish in 1835?

Tortilla de patatas: legend has Zumalacárregui wanting a fast, filling dish for his army during the 1835 siege of Bilbao, but a Navarrese document had already described the potato omelette in 1817.

Potato starch was a key ingredient in which early colour photography process?

Autochrome: the Lumière brothers' 1907 plates used a mosaic of dyed potato starch grains as colour filters, and held sway until Kodachrome and Agfacolor arrived in the mid-1930s.

Which Italian dumplings are classically made from mashed potato and flour?

Gnocchi: the dumplings are older than the potato's arrival in Italy, and Rome's own gnocchi alla romana are still made without it, from semolina.

Ray Kroc contracted which supplier in 1967 to provide McDonald's with frozen fries?

J. R. Simplot: his firm had brought frozen fries to market in the 1940s, and the 1967 deal with Kroc, sealed on a handshake, helped make him a billionaire several times over.

Which frozen-fries giant was founded in 1957 in Florenceville, New Brunswick, the self-styled 'French fry capital of the world'?

McCain Foods: the four McCain brothers, sons of a seed-potato farmer whose family had traded in the crop for generations, opened their first frozen-fry plant in their own home town.

Papas arrugadas, the Canary Islands' 'wrinkly potatoes', were originally boiled in what?

Seawater: stories of the dish's origin say fresh water was too scarce to waste, so the unpeeled potatoes were boiled in brine from the sea; cooks now get the same salt crust from heavily salted tap water.

Tartiflette, the Savoyard potato bake with lardons and onions, is made with what?

Reblochon cheese: far from ancient, the modern dish took off in ski resorts in the 1980s, helped by a promotional push from the Reblochon makers' own trade body to sell more of it.

Tornado potatoes, spiral-cut and fried on a skewer, are street food from which country?

South Korea: hoeori gamja, the 'whirlwind potato', is a Seoul street-stall staple; Australians call the spiral 'chips on a stick', and in Mexico it is sold as espiropapas.

In The Martian (2015), stranded botanist Mark Watney fertilises his potato crop with what?

The crew's waste: Watney mixes the bagged human waste into Martian soil inside the habitat and makes water for the crop by burning leftover rocket fuel.

The Indian curry aloo gobi pairs potatoes with which vegetable?

Cauliflower: the 'aloo' half is a New World crop that reached India only with European traders, so even this North Indian classic is just a few centuries old.

Causa, a cold terrine of mashed potato layered with avocado and tuna, is a classic of which country?

Peru: the name is traced to the Quechua kawsay, 'sustenance of life', though a popular story has the dish sold on street corners to fund the cause of independence.

Which Irish mash of potato with kale or cabbage traditionally hides charms at Halloween?

Colcannon: mashed potato folded with kale or cabbage; at Halloween a ring or coin was hidden in it to foretell marriage or wealth for whoever found it.