Potato Dishes and Egg Dishes

Appears in

#25Honey from a Weed
Honey from a Weed

By Patience Gray

Published 1986

  • About
IT must now be known by many people that the potato is of Peruvian rather than of Virginian origin, however much one clings to childhood’s Raleigh story.
It arrived around 1570 in Spain in the wake of Pizarro’s conquest of Peru; and was already cultivated in parts of Italy in the early 1580s, as reported by Clusius.

The story of a plant introduction is like a very involved detective story and I therefore refer you to the dramatic ‘search’ in the newly reissued work of Salaman, The Economic and Social Influence of the Potato, and particularly to Chapter IX, ‘The Introduction to Europe: the Raleigh and other legends’.