The potato came to Europe from the Andes. Spanish conquerors met it in the highlands of what are now Peru and Bolivia in the 1530s, and by the 1570s it was growing in Spain. What followed was one of the strangest journeys in food history: two centuries of suspicion, royal campaigns to persuade reluctant farmers, a catastrophe in Ireland and, at last, the chip. Along the way the potato picked up a few genuine heroes and rather more legends. Here is how to tell them apart.
Seven thousand years in the mountains
Long before Europe had heard of it, the potato was the foundation of life in the high Andes. It was domesticated around Lake Titicaca, on the border of modern Peru and Bolivia, at least seven thousand years ago, and Andean farmers bred thousands of varieties: yellow, purple, knobbly, bitter, frost-hardy. They also invented one of the world's first freeze-dried foods, chuño. Potatoes were left out in the freezing mountain nights, trodden to press out their water and dried in the sun until they would keep for years. Stores of chuño helped feed the armies and cities of the Inca state.
A suspicious newcomer
Records show potatoes in the Canary Islands by the 1560s and in Spain by the 1570s, and from there they spread slowly through Italy, the Low Countries and the botanical gardens of Europe. Nobody greeted them with enthusiasm. The potato belongs to the nightshade family, and its leaves, flowers and any green parts of the tuber contain toxic compounds, so a certain wariness was not unreasonable. Rumours followed it too, including claims that it caused leprosy. For a long time it was mostly food for livestock, hospitals and the very poor.
Britain likes to credit Sir Walter Raleigh with bringing the potato home, or planting the first ones in Ireland. It is a good story, but there is no solid evidence for either claim. The potato was certainly in England by the 1590s: the herbalist John Gerard illustrated it in his Herball of 1597, confusingly calling it the "Virginia potato". But exactly how it first crossed to the British Isles is unknown.
Kings, prisoners and a guarded field
In the eighteenth century, governments began to see what peasants had been slow to accept: potatoes produce far more food per acre than grain, grow underground where passing armies can't easily trample or burn them, and survive the weather that ruins a wheat harvest.
In Prussia, Frederick the Great issued an order in 1756, known in German as the Kartoffelbefehl, instructing his officials to promote potato growing. That is documented. The famous tale that he planted a royal potato field and had it guarded, so that curious peasants would steal the "valuable" crop, is not; it is also told about others, which is usually a sign of legend. Visitors still leave potatoes on Frederick's grave at Sanssouci in Potsdam.
France's potato champion was Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, an army pharmacist who ate potatoes as a prisoner of war in Prussia during the Seven Years' War and came home convinced of their value. In 1772 the Paris Faculty of Medicine declared the potato fit to eat, and Parmentier spent years promoting it with dinners, pamphlets and demonstration plots near Paris. The best-known stories, that he posted guards on his field by day and withdrew them at night to tempt thieves, and that Marie Antoinette wore potato flowers in her hair, are widely repeated and hard to verify. His lasting monument is linguistic: in French, a dish called Parmentier, such as hachis Parmentier, contains potatoes.
Ireland: the cost of depending on one crop
Nowhere did the potato take hold more completely than in Ireland. By the early nineteenth century millions of the rural poor lived almost entirely on it, much of it a single variety called the Lumper. In 1845 potato blight, a mould-like organism called Phytophthora infestans, reached Ireland and destroyed the crop year after year. In the Great Famine of 1845 to 1852, about a million people died and more than a million emigrated. Historians stress that poverty, land ownership and government policy, not only a plant disease, turned a crop failure into a catastrophe.
And then came the chip
Once Europe had accepted the potato, it began to fry it, and the arguments started. Belgium tells a story of villagers in the Meuse valley who fried small fish and, when the river froze, cut potatoes into fish shapes instead. Charming, but historians have found little evidence for it. France points to the street vendors of Paris, who were selling fried potatoes by the early nineteenth century. The claim that "French fries" were named by American soldiers in Belgium during the First World War is also doubtful: "French fried potatoes" appears in English well before 1914.
Britain's great contribution was fish and chips. Fried fish had arrived with Sephardic Jewish immigrants, whose tradition of frying fish in batter goes back centuries, and in the 1860s the two came together. Joseph Malin in London and John Lees in Lancashire both have their supporters as the first fish-and-chip seller, and the rivalry has never been settled. Crisps have a myth of their own: the American tale of a chef named George Crum inventing them in 1853 to annoy a fussy customer came later, and a recipe for potatoes fried in thin shavings had already appeared in William Kitchiner's The Cook's Oracle in 1817.
Making great chips at home
- Pick a floury potato. Maris Piper and King Edward, or Russet in North America, give fluffy insides and crisp edges. Waxy potatoes turn leathery.
- Rinse off the starch. Cut even chips, then soak them in cold water for 30 minutes to remove surface starch, which makes them sticky and prone to scorching.
- Dry them properly. Water is the enemy of crispness. Pat the chips completely dry with a clean tea towel before they meet any oil.
- Use a little oil, not a lot. In an air fryer, a tablespoon for 500 g of chips is plenty. Cook at about 200°C for 18 to 25 minutes, shaking the basket every five minutes.
- Don't overcrowd. Chips piled deep steam instead of crisping, so cook in batches. It is one of the most common air fryer mistakes.
- Salt at the end, while the chips are hot, so it sticks.
If you are wondering whether to use the air fryer or the oven for a big batch, our comparison of the air fryer and the oven sets out when each works best.
Where to find it in our books
The Everyday Air Fryer has a whole chapter that tells this story the tasty way. It starts with the Classic Air Fryer Fries and the Air Fryer Fish & Chips, adds a nod to Kitchiner's shavings with the Salt & Vinegar Potato Crisps, and finishes with the Air Fryer Hasselback Potatoes, named after the Stockholm restaurant where the fan-cut potato is said to have been created in the twentieth century, and the Crispy Smashed Potatoes. Search the recipe finder for potatoes to see every potato recipe across our books.
Questions people ask
Where did potatoes originally come from?
From the Andes of South America. They were domesticated around Lake Titicaca, on the Peru–Bolivia border, at least seven thousand years ago, and reached Europe with the Spanish in the sixteenth century.
Did Sir Walter Raleigh bring the potato to Europe?
Almost certainly not. The potato reached Spain first, by the 1570s, and there is no good evidence that Raleigh introduced it to England or Ireland. The story is a legend.
Are French fries French or Belgian?
Both countries claim them, and neither can prove it. Paris street vendors were selling fried potatoes by the early nineteenth century; the Belgian origin story is popular but poorly documented.
Why were Europeans afraid of potatoes?
The potato was unfamiliar, grew from a tuber rather than seed, and belongs to the nightshade family, whose leaves and green parts are toxic. Rumours linked it to disease, and it took two centuries, several famines and some determined campaigners to win it acceptance.