Boiled potato, roasted potato, fried potato, cooked potato, finger chips, potato chips, spiced potato salad, potato paratha, potato with cumin, potato chilly…and the list goes on and on! Potato is such a versatile vegetable. I can be made into so many different things.
Potato is cooked either singly, or with other vegetables, or with eggs or meat. No matter what you add it with, potato readily agrees. It picks up the taste of anything you cook it with. What a magic vegetable potato is!
Don’t you sometimes wonder where potato came from? Where it originated? How it came to be so popular all over the world?
The word ‘potato’ comes from the Spanish word ‘patata’. Patata is combined from two names: Taino batata (sweet potato) and the Quechua papa (potato). The name ‘potato’ originally referred to a type of sweet potato.
The Inca Indians in Peru were the first people to cultivate potato around 8,000 BC to 5,000 BC. This vegetable was brought into Europe by Spanish ships around 1570, and though they planted potatoes in Spain, they mainly used it as feed for animals. While the potato spread through Europe, it was not embraced as the hearty, healthy food it is today. In 1662, the Royal Society in England started to recommend cultivating potatoes, but still, eating it by humans there didn’t take place for over a century. In 1795, the Europeans starting eating it, and since then, it has continued to be a compulsory thing on their dining table. As for the United States, it was brought in by the European migrants around 1836 and planted for the first time
The annual diet of a person in the first decade of the 21st Century included about 35 kilograms of potato. If that is the case, you can imagine how much potato is consumed in a Nepali family of five to six members every year.
Potato is an important crop of Europe. The production is very high here, or say, the highest in the world. Southern and eastern Asian counties also grow and consume it in a high amount. At present, China is the largest potato producing country in the world. Nearly one-third of the world’s potatoes are harvested from China and India.
Potatoes contain rich amount of carbohydrates that give us energy. It is in the form of starch. Consuming potatoes is like consuming wheat or rice. They also give us minerals and vitamin. They are cheap, easy to grow and useful to us in many ways. They have been kings of the kitchens all over the world for centuries.