90 Fun Facts About Potatoes

Despite their name, French fries are claimed as a national invention by which country?

Belgium claims the fry: one story has Meuse valley villagers frying potato strips when the river froze and fish ran short, and American soldiers there in World War I are said to have called them 'French' after the local language.

Potatoes belong to the nightshade family, along with eggplants, chili peppers and which other crop?

Tobacco is a nightshade too: the family is known for potent alkaloids, from tobacco's nicotine to the poisons of belladonna, and the potato plant's own leaves and berries are toxic.

Although it grows underground, a potato is botanically a swollen part of which plant organ?

The stem: each potato swells at the tip of an underground stem called a stolon to store nutrients for the plant, whereas the sweet potato, for all the shared name, is a swollen true root.

Which European country first introduced potatoes to Europe in the late 16th century?

Spain carried the potato home after its conquest of the Inca Empire, introducing it to Europe in the second half of the 16th century as part of the Columbian exchange.

What plant disease caused Ireland's Great Famine in the 1840s?

The lack of genetic diversity in potatoes grown in Europe made the crop vulnerable to diseases, with late blight disease destroying potato crops in Ireland and leading to the Great Famine of the 1840s.

Which country grows more potatoes than any other?

China is the world's largest potato producer, with about a quarter of the 2024 crop; the harvest was once centred on Europe, but more than half the world's potatoes now grow in developing countries.

A medium skin-on potato supplies over 600 milligrams of which mineral?

Potassium: a medium skin-on potato has around 620 milligrams against a medium banana's 422, so the fruit famous for it is comfortably beaten.

Which chef is widely credited with inventing the potato chip at a Saratoga Springs resort in 1853?

George Crum, cook at Moon's Lake House, is said to have sliced potatoes wafer-thin after a diner sent back his fries; the tale took hold only after his death, and chip recipes had been in print for decades.

Which high-starch, dry-fleshed potato is ideal for baking and french fries?

Russet potatoes are characterized by their high starch content and dry, mealy flesh, making them excellent for baking and frying into crispy french fries.

Which waxy potato is a favourite for potato salad because its slices hold their shape when boiled?

Red Bliss is a waxy potato: with less starch and more moisture than a floury baker, its flesh stays firm through boiling, so the slices keep their shape instead of crumbling into the dressing.

What natural toxin is found in all green parts of the potato plant?

Solanine is the plant's built-in pesticide, found in the leaves, shoots and berries; tubers left in the light turn green and make more of it, which is why green potatoes are best peeled deeply or thrown out.

Potatoes were first domesticated around 8,000 years ago by farmers living near which South American lake?

Lake Titicaca, 3,800 metres up on the border of Bolivia and Peru, is where highland farmers first tamed wild tubers; the crop took to a cold, harsh climate that defeats most others.

What are the 'eyes' on a potato for?

Sprouting new plants: each eye is a cluster of buds, so farmers plant cut pieces of 'seed potato' instead of true seed, and every plant that grows is a clone of its parent.

Despite its name, the sweet potato is only a distant relative of the potato and belongs to which plant family?

The morning glory family: the sweet potato is the swollen root of a twining vine and shares only its plant order with the true potato, so the two are distant cousins that happen to share a name.

The potato ranks third among the world's food crops for human consumption, behind which two staple grains?

Rice and wheat rank ahead of the potato as food for people; corn is harvested in greater tonnage than any of them, but much of it goes to animal feed.

Which classic French dish bakes thinly sliced raw potatoes slowly in cream, in a dish rubbed with garlic?

Gratin dauphinois was first recorded in 1788, at a dinner the Duke of Clermont-Tonnerre gave in Gap; the classic version has no cheese, which crept in with later recipes such as Escoffier's Gruyère one.

Southern German potato salad swaps mayonnaise for a warm dressing of oil, vinegar and what?

Meat broth is the Swabian secret: the potatoes are sliced while still hot and doused with broth, vinegar and oil, which they soak up as they cool.

In 1926 Laura Scudder's workers ironed sheets of what into sealed bags that kept potato chips fresh?

Wax paper: chips had gone stale fast and travelled badly, so Scudder's hand-ironed bags, each printed with a freshness date, let them be sold well beyond the neighbourhood fryer.

Which spirit has traditionally been distilled from potatoes as well as from grain?

Vodka began as a grain spirit in Russia and Poland; potatoes went into the still only later, once the crop had spread there, and most vodka today is again made from grain.

What type of organism is Phytophthora infestans, the cause of Ireland's Great Famine?

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

Which Irish dish mashes potatoes with cooked kale or cabbage?

Colcannon takes its name from the Irish cál ceannann, a word for cabbage; it was a cheap, year-round staple and is now a fixture of St Patrick's Day tables, often beside boiled ham or bacon.

Which Swiss dish is a pan-fried cake of coarsely grated potato?

Rösti is a Swiss cake of coarsely grated potato fried in butter until golden; originally a Bernese farmers' breakfast, it lent its name to the 'Röstigraben', the German-French language divide.

Which US vice president corrected a schoolboy's 'potato' to 'potatoe' at a 1992 spelling bee?

Dan Quayle, George H. W. Bush's vice president, told 12-year-old William Figueroa to add an 'e' at a June 1992 spelling bee in Trenton, although the boy had spelled 'potato' correctly.

Decades before the Saratoga Springs legend, the earliest known potato chip recipe was printed in 1817 in which country?

England: Dr William Kitchiner's bestselling The Cook's Oracle told readers to fry potato 'slices or shavings' in lard or dripping, 36 years before the Saratoga story is set.

The overcrowded vessels that carried emigrants away from Ireland's potato famine earned which grim nickname?

Coffin ships earned the name because so many passengers died on the Atlantic crossing: packed, short of food and water and riddled with disease, they set off a typhus epidemic at North American quarantine stations in 1847.

Florenceville-Bristol, New Brunswick, calls itself the French fry capital of the world as the home of which potato-processing giant?

McCain Foods was founded in Florenceville in 1957 and now claims to make one in every four French fries eaten worldwide; the community is also home to a museum called Potato World.

Which triangular Indian pastry is most often stuffed with spiced potato and peas?

Samosa: for all its Indian fame, the pastry arrived from the Middle East and Central Asia, where cousins such as sambusak are still eaten, and it now turns up from West Africa to Southeast Asia.

From 1909 the Northern Pacific Railway won fame for serving which oversized dish in its dining cars?

Baked potato: dining-car chief Hazen Titus bought two-pound Yakima Valley potatoes that farmers could not sell because they were too big, and the line was soon billing itself as the Route of the Great Big Baked Potato.

The English word 'potato' descends from 'batata', a word in which language?

The Taíno word batata actually meant the sweet potato; Europeans simply transferred the name to the Andean tuber.

Which nickname for the potato first meant a short knife and later a narrow digging spade?

Spud meant a short knife or dagger in the 15th century, then a spade-like digging tool; the name seems to have passed to the potato from the implement that lifted it out of the ground.

Potatoes left in the light turn green because their skin fills with what?

Chlorophyll itself is harmless, but the light that triggers it also makes the tuber step up its bitter natural toxins, so the green is a warning sign and not the danger.

After flowering, a potato plant produces small green fruits that look like which other food?

Cherry tomatoes are the right comparison because the two plants are close relatives; the potato's little green berries are packed with true seeds but, unlike a tomato, are poisonous.

The potato was first tamed in the high Andes, but today's most widely grown subspecies is native to islands off which country?

Chile: the potatoes of its Chiloé Archipelago were adapted to the long summer days of higher latitudes, unlike the short-day types of the tropical Andes, and islanders still grow hundreds of native varieties.

Which potato chip brand long dared snackers with the slogan 'Betcha can't eat just one'?

Lay's hired Bert Lahr, the Cowardly Lion of The Wizard of Oz, as its first celebrity spokesman in the early 1960s, and his purred challenge became the brand's best-known line.

The International Potato Center, keeper of thousands of potato types, is based where?

Lima has hosted the International Potato Center since Peru's government set it up by decree in 1971; its genebank conserves more than 7,000 native, wild and improved potatoes and supplies them to farmers and breeders.

In the UK, which famous new potato takes its name from a Channel Island?

Jersey Royals come only from Jersey, where the earliest are planted on steep slopes called côtils that warm quickly in spring; the name is protected by law, so potatoes grown anywhere else cannot use it.

Monsanto's 'New Leaf' GM potato carried Bt genes for resistance to which pest?

NewLeaf potatoes, sold from 1995, carried genes from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis that made them poisonous to the Colorado beetle; they found only a small market, and Monsanto withdrew them in 2001.

Piling extra soil around the base of growing potato plants is known as what?

Hilling, called 'earthing up' in Britain, mounds soil around the stems so tubers forming near the surface stay covered and do not turn green.

Andean chuño, which keeps for years, is made by leaving potatoes out overnight to do what?

Freeze: highland farmers leave potatoes out in the night frost, let them thaw in the morning sun and then tread out the water, leaving a light, dry food that stores for years without refrigeration.

Cepelinai, meat-stuffed grated-potato dumplings, are the national dish of which country?

Cepelinai are Lithuania's national dish: the name means 'zeppelins' after the dumplings' airship shape, and they are served with sour cream and fried bacon bits.

In much of Latin America the potato is called 'papa', a word taken from which language of the Inca Empire?

Quechua gave the Andes' conquerors the word papa, still the everyday name for the potato across Latin America; 'patata' arose later as a blend of papa with the Caribbean word batata.

Which 1885 canvas, painted in Nuenen, did Van Gogh regard as the showpiece of his early career?

The Potato Eaters (1885), painted in Nuenen, shows the de Groot family at their lamplit table; Van Gogh deliberately chose coarse models to show peasants as they really were.

Which British pie of minced lamb is topped with mashed potato instead of pastry?

Shepherd's pie began as a thrifty way to use up leftover cooked meat; purists keep the name for lamb and call the beef version cottage pie, the older term of the two, recorded in 1791.

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

Human waste: botanist Watney digs the crew's bagged waste into Martian soil inside the Hab and makes water from leftover rocket fuel, until an airlock blowout destroys his potato garden.

Which British dish fries up leftover potato and cabbage?

Bubble and squeak is said to be named for the noises it makes in the pan; its 18th-century versions fried beef with the cabbage, and potato only took over as the main ingredient in the 20th century.

In the United States, soft orange sweet potatoes are often sold under the name of which unrelated tropical tuber?

Yam is the label American growers gave moist, orange-fleshed sweet potatoes to tell them apart from firmer kinds; true yams belong to a different plant family altogether.

Which monarch issued the 1756 'Potato Edict' and was nicknamed the Kartoffelkönig?

Frederick the Great of Prussia issued the edict to make sceptical farmers plant the unfamiliar tuber; visitors to Sanssouci still lay potatoes on his gravestone in thanks.

Marie Antoinette is said to have worn potato flowers as what?

A headdress: after Parmentier presented bouquets of potato blossom at court, the queen is said to have worn the flowers in her hair and the king one in his buttonhole, setting off a brief court fashion.

Which coarse, heavy-cropping potato did most of Ireland's poor rely on before the Great Famine?

The Lumper thrived in poor, wet soil and gave enormous yields, so it fed much of Ireland; with so many fields planted to one variety, the crop had little genetic variety when disease struck in 1845.

Which Jewish pastry, a New York street-food classic, is most often stuffed with mashed potato?

Knish is a round or square of dough wrapped around a filling and baked or fried; Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe carried it to America, where it became a fixture of New York City street food.

Lefse, a soft flatbread often made with potato and eaten buttered and folded, is a tradition of which country?

Norway's lefse is rolled thin, cooked on a griddle and eaten buttered, often with sugar and cinnamon; Scandinavian Americans kept the tradition alive and added fillings of their own, such as peanut butter.

Friedrich Engels ranked the potato with which material for its 'revolutionary role'?

Iron: Engels called iron the last raw material to play a revolutionary role in history 'until the potato', the cheap crop that was feeding Europe's swelling industrial workforce.

Basque fishermen are said to have brought the potato to Ireland while drying which fish?

Cod: one tradition holds that Basque fishermen, who dried their Newfoundland cod on Ireland's west coast, brought the first potatoes; Ireland was growing them widely by the early 1600s.

Suspicious early Europeans gave the underground-growing potato which nickname?

'The devil's apples' was the name given to a plant that grew out of sight underground and looked like its poisonous nightshade relatives; farmers eyed it with suspicion and many assumed it was toxic too.

Before reaching mainland Europe, potatoes were being grown by the 1560s on which Atlantic islands?

The Canaries give the first evidence of potato growing on European soil, in the 1560s; within a decade the crop had reached the mainland, and tubers were soon being passed around Europe as exotic gifts.

Potatoes reached which African country, a German and then Belgian territory, in the early 1900s?

Rwanda grows its potatoes in the highlands, where they have become a staple and a cash crop; by 2007 it was the third largest producer south of the Sahara.

A potato can power a small clock when fitted with one electrode of zinc and one of which other metal?

Copper and zinc turn the potato's juice into the electrolyte of a simple battery; researchers in Jerusalem found that boiling the potato for eight minutes first boosts its output about tenfold.

A Pringles chip is a hyperbolic paraboloid, a shape better known as which object?

A saddle: the dough is pressed into that shape before frying, so every chip is identical and stacks in a tube, the answer chemist Fredric Baur found to complaints about broken chips in bags.

Which soap and detergent giant launched Pringles in 1968?

Procter & Gamble put a chemist on the problem of broken, half-empty chip bags in 1956 and took twelve years to reach the shelf; it left the food business in 2012, selling Pringles to Kellogg's for about $2.7 billion.

After a 1975 US FDA ruling on the word 'chip', what did Pringles call its product instead?

Potato crisps: the 1975 FDA ruling allowed 'chip' only inside the phrase 'potato chips made from dried potatoes', so Pringles relabelled its product 'potato crisps' in the United States.

Which science-fiction author helped develop the machine that cooks Pringles?

Gene Wolfe trained as an industrial engineer and helped develop the machine that cooks the chips, then spent years editing the journal Plant Engineering before The Book of the New Sun made his name.

Which Irish company produced the world's first seasoned crisps in 1954?

Tayto's Joe 'Spud' Murphy and his employee Seamus Burke produced the first flavoured crisps, cheese and onion, in 1954; firms around the world sought the rights, and rivals such as Golden Wonder soon made their own.

Smith's 1920s London crisps came in greaseproof bags with a twist of what?

Salt: Frank Smith's Cricklewood firm sold plain crisps from 1920 with a twist of blue greaseproof paper holding salt; the Salt 'n' Shake brand later revived the idea with a sachet in the bag.

Kettle-cooked chips such as Cape Cod's are fried in which old-fashioned way?

In small batches: kettle chips are fried a load at a time at a lower temperature and raked to keep the slices apart, the way every chip was made before continuous fryers took over.

Ketchup-flavoured potato chips are a regional favourite in which country?

Canada has had ketchup chips since the 1970s, when the Hostess brand sold an early version; all-dressed and dill pickle round out a flavour line-up the country calls its own.

Until 1990, McDonald's cooked its French fries mainly in which fat?

Beef tallow gave the original fries their rich taste; the chain switched to vegetable oil in 1990 amid public worry about cholesterol, then added beef flavouring to make up for what was lost.

Mr. Potato Head made history in 1952 as the first toy to be what?

Advertised on television: the 1952 commercial was the first ever made for a toy, and it helped its maker take more than $4 million in sales within a few months.

The first Mr. Potato Head kits had no body, so children pushed the face parts into what?

A real vegetable: inventor George Lerner meant the parts to give dinner-table produce some personality; complaints about rotting vegetables and new safety rules later brought in the plastic body.

Which toy company launched Mr. Potato Head in 1952, its first big hit?

Hasbro, then the Hassenfeld Brothers firm, bought George Lerner's push-in face parts in 1952 after a cereal maker had taken them as box prizes; the toy became the company's first popular success.

In 1985 Mr. Potato Head received four write-in votes for mayor of which city?

Boise, Idaho: in the 1985 mayoral election Mr. Potato Head picked up four write-in votes, which Guinness World Records listed as the most votes for Mr. Potato Head in a political campaign.

Mr. Potato Head surrendered which accessory to the US Surgeon General in 1987?

His pipe: in 1987 Mr. Potato Head handed his pipe to Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and became 'Spokespud' for the American Cancer Society's Great American Smokeout.

Who voiced Mr. Potato Head in the original Toy Story (1995)?

Don Rickles, the insult comic, voiced the grumpy toy in the first three films; for Toy Story 4, made after his death in 2017, Pixar pieced his part together from unused archive recordings.

Poutine first appeared in the 1950s in rural snack bars of which province?

Quebec: several towns in its dairy-rich Centre-du-Québec region, Warwick among them, claim the invention, which depended on nearby dairies supplying the key topping fresh each day.

Classic poutine tops French fries and gravy with what?

Cheese curds have to be fresh: they keep their soft, squeaky bite only briefly after cheesemaking, which is why poutine took root in dairy country, a short drive from the cheesemakers.

Montreal chef Martin Picard of Au Pied de Cochon famously topped poutine with which luxury ingredient?

Foie gras: Picard's version at Au Pied de Cochon in the early 2000s was the first to take the snack-bar dish upmarket, and chefs in Toronto and Vancouver soon followed with luxury poutines of their own.

Tater Tots were developed in 1953 by the founders of which frozen food company?

Ore-Ida founders F. Nephi and Golden Grigg created Tater Tots in 1953 to use up leftover potato slivers from fry cutting; the Tater Tots name was registered as an Ore-Ida trademark.

Tater Tots sold slowly at first until their maker did what?

Raised the price: the family behind Tater Tots guessed that shoppers saw something so cheap as worthless, and once it cost more, people began to buy it.

In the British pub dish bangers and mash, the mash is potato, but what are the bangers?

Sausages: the slang is often said to date from the Second World War, but 'banger' was already in print by 1919; the pair is usually served under onion gravy.

Vichyssoise is a creamy soup, usually served cold, made from potatoes and which other vegetable?

Leeks: for all its French name, vichyssoise is generally credited to Louis Diat, a French-born chef who put it on the menu of the Ritz-Carlton in New York early in the 20th century.

Which American plant breeder developed the forerunner of the Idaho potato?

Luther Burbank sold the rights to his new potato for $150 and spent the money on his fare to California, where he set up the experimental gardens at Santa Rosa that made him famous.

Which British prime minister repealed the Corn Laws in 1846 as potato famine gripped Ireland?

Robert Peel carried repeal with the votes of his opponents, and the decision cost him the premiership within the year; he is also remembered as the founder of London's Metropolitan Police.

Hasselback potatoes are named after a restaurant in which city?

Stockholm's Hasselbacken restaurant says a trainee cook first served the fan-cut potatoes there in 1953; the name means 'hazel slope', after the hazel thicket that grew beside it.

Latkes are traditionally eaten to celebrate which holiday?

Hanukkah: latkes are fried in oil to recall the Temple oil that, in the Hanukkah story, burned for eight days after the Maccabees rededicated the sanctuary.

Which dumplings, a Polish speciality, are often stuffed with mashed potato and cheese?

Pierogi are boiled and often pan-fried afterwards; the word is already a plural, one dumpling being a pieróg, so the English 'pierogies' pluralises it twice.

Tartiflette, potatoes baked with lardons and a whole Reblochon, comes from which Alpine region?

Savoy: tartiflette bakes sliced potatoes with lardons, onions and a whole Reblochon, the Savoyard cheese; the dish was popularised in the 1980s to boost Reblochon sales.

Which fertiliser, dug from seabird islands off Peru, did 19th-century Europe import to feed its potato fields?

Guano, the dried droppings of seabirds, lay up to 150 feet deep on Peru's Chincha Islands; rich in the nitrogen crops need, it became the world's first intensive fertiliser.

Many 18th-century French farmers shunned the potato partly because it was thought to cause which disease?

Leprosy was only one of the charges: some thought the potato an aphrodisiac, others a cause of fever, and France stayed especially slow to adopt the crop until Parmentier made it his life's cause.

American farmers of the 1860s fought the insect stripping their potato fields with Paris green, a pigment laced with which poison?

Arsenic: Paris green was a paint and wallpaper pigment that turned out to kill the invader, and the race to make ever stronger arsenic sprays launched the modern pesticide industry.

Cubed home fries with bell peppers added are known as what?

Potatoes O'Brien are diced fried potatoes with green and red bell peppers and onion; Potatoes Lyonnaise, by contrast, are sliced and fried with onions only.

Which Italian dumplings, once made from semolina or flour alone, are now most often made with potato?

Gnocchi go back to Roman times, long before the potato reached Europe; the potato kind that now dominates entered Italian kitchens only in the 19th century.