The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks (13 page)

POTATO

Solanum tuberosum

solanaceae (nightshade family)

O
n June 3, 1946, a headline in the
New York Times
read, “Potato May Avert Drinkers' Drought.” Wartime grain shortages had been hard on beer and whiskey drinkers. The Agriculture Department had diverted grain to more important uses: food, livestock feed, and the production of industrial alcohol for rubber manufacturing. Restrictions continued after the war as troops wound down their operations and relief shipments to devastated postwar Europe got under way.

Because of the shortages, distilleries were allotted a single ten-day mashing period per month, with limits on the amount of rye or other grains that could go into the mash. With so little raw material to work with, the distillers got creative. They asked for a share of the nation's heavily rationed potato supply, explaining that they could put the lower-grade, smaller, misshapen potatoes to use in making blended whiskies, gins, or cordials while saving the higher-quality potatoes for food. This move, the Agricultural Department pointed out, could “change the drinking habits of Americans and make popular such potato drinks as vodka.”

At the time, vodka was virtually unknown to American drinkers. In 1946, Americans drank only one million gallons of vodka, less than 1 percent of all spirits consumed in the country. By 1965, that number had grown to thirty million. Vodka has always been made of rye, wheat, and other grains in addition to potatoes, but Americans nonetheless thought of the spirit as an exotic, specifically potato-based drink.

The potato traces its ancestry to Peru. Wild potatoes (
Solanum maglia
and
S. berthaultii
) grew along the western coast of South America at least thirteen thousand years ago, when glaciers still covered higher elevation areas. By 8000 BC, the glaciers were receding and the coast became more dry and desertlike, so people moved up to higher elevations. It was there, in the Andes mountain range, that early Peruvians cultivated potatoes. Growing conditions were difficult and unpredictable—weather changed quickly on the rocky slopes—so thousands of different cultivars were grown, each with its own ecological niche.

The first Spaniards to encounter the Inca empire in 1528 found an astonishingly sophisticated civilization. A road system spanning more than fourteen thousand miles, highly advanced architecture, a system of taxation and public works projects, and thoroughly modern farming techniques made the Inca Empire comparable to the Roman Empire. Francisco Pizarro and his men were so dazzled by the Inca's gold and jewels that the grubby potato hardly seemed worth picking up. It was a few more decades before the potato was grown in Europe, and it was not widely cultivated as a food crop until later in the seventeenth century.

Europeans didn't trust the potato because it was a member of the dangerous nightshade family. Old World members of this family, including henbane and deadly nightshade, were highly toxic. That gave them reason to fear all the nightshades they found in the New World, including potatoes, tomatoes, and tobacco. (They were equally suspicious of eggplant, a nightshade native to India.) And in fact, the potato plant does bloom and produce small, poisonous fruit similar to that of other nightshades. Even the starchy tubers can accumulate toxic levels of the alkaloid solanine if exposed to light; this is a defensive reaction designed to protect a vulnerable, unearthed potato from predators.

Because it was a nightshade, and because it was eaten by so-called primitive people in South America, potatoes were seen at best as a commodity to be fed to slaves and at worse as a dirty, evil root that caused scrofula and rickets. The fact that the Irish embraced the potato only helped convince the English that it was a lowly food fit
only for a peasant. Nonetheless, it did eventually become established throughout Europe. Explorers also took it to Asia, Africa, and to the new colonies in North America.

Ask people today about the invention of vodka, and you might hear that it is made from potatoes and that it comes from Russia. Neither statement is entirely true. Vodka was already being distilled from grains long before the potato ever arrived in Europe. The birthplace of vodka is the subject of endless dispute between Russia and Poland, with each claiming the spirit as its own. What is known for certain is that a clear, high-proof spirit distilled from grain was made throughout the region by the 1400s. The Polish term
wodki,
meaning “little waters,” was used by Stefan Falimirz in his 1523 medical text
On Herbs and Their Powers,
long before potatoes could have been used in
wodki.
They were only just being discovered in Latin America at that time and had not yet reached Europe.

By the eighteenth century, potatoes were a staple food crop in eastern Europe, and distillers were experimenting with them as early as 1760. Those early trials must have been difficult. Potatoes, after all, are merely thickened stems that grow underground and store food and water for the next generation. Unlike the starch in grain, the starch in a potato is not intended to be converted to sugar all at once to feed a germinating seed. Instead, it is released slowly, over a long growing season, to nourish a young plant. This is a brilliant survival strategy for the potato, but it doesn't help the distiller.

A Polish pamphlet called
The Perfect Distiller and Brewer,
published in 1809, described the process of distilling vodka from potatoes, with the warning that it was the worst kind of vodka, behind vodka made from sugar beets, grains, apples, grapes, and acorns. In fact, potatoes only became a common ingredient in Polish vodka because they were cheap and abundant, not because they made a high-quality spirit. They tended to turn into a thick, sticky paste in the fermentation tank, the starch was not easy to convert to sugar, and they produced higher levels of toxic methanol and fusel oils. Russian vodka makers looked down on cheap Polish potato vodkas; to this day, they insist that the best vodka is made from rye or wheat instead.