28 July 1586: Britain is introduced to the potato
On this day in 1586, Sir Thomas Harriot brought the first potato back to Britain from the 'New Found Land of Virginia'. We've been in love ever since.
If there was ever a vegetable that has helped shape our national destiny, it's the humble spud. A mainstay of our national dish, we serve it in a hundred different ways, and always insist on it being there for Sunday lunch.
In England, it partners up with cabbage to make bubble and squeak', or colcannon if you're in Ireland. And in Scotland, tatties' go hand-in-hand with neeps on Burns Night. In fact, the potato is so much a part of our culture, it's easy to forget it isn't even British.
On this day in 1586, Sir Thomas Harriot stepped off the boat in Plymouth. He had just returned from Sir Walter Raleigh's English colony on Roanoke Island in modern-day North Carolina, where he had made detailed studies of the wildlife and potatoes.
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In the months that followed, Harriot recorded his adventures in A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. In it, he described a curious tuber:
"Openavk are kind of roots of round forme, some of the bignes of walnuts, some far greater, which are found in moist & marish grounds growing many together one by another in ropes, or as thogh they were a string. Being boiled or sodden they are very good meate."
Britain isn't short of "moist & marish grounds" and the potato soon took root, so to speak. Since then, potatoes have become part and parcel of our national cuisine and our history too.
The failure of the potato crop in Ireland in the 1840s sparked one of the first great waves of emigration to the United States. And the great Marxist thinker, Friedrich Engels, even saw the "farinaceous tubers", as he called them, as having fuelled Britain's industrial revolution: "[Iron] is the last and most important of all raw products that play a revolutionary role in history; the last if we except the potato."
So, next time you're eating mashed openavk', remember that if it wasn't for Sir Thomas Harriot, Britain today might look and taste very different.
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Chris Carter spent three glorious years reading English literature on the beautiful Welsh coast at Aberystwyth University. Graduating in 2005, he left for the University of York to specialise in Renaissance literature for his MA, before returning to his native Twickenham, in southwest London. He joined a Richmond-based recruitment company, where he worked with several clients, including the Queen’s bank, Coutts, as well as the super luxury, Dorchester-owned Coworth Park country house hotel, near Ascot in Berkshire.
Then, in 2011, Chris joined MoneyWeek. Initially working as part of the website production team, Chris soon rose to the lofty heights of wealth editor, overseeing MoneyWeek’s Spending It lifestyle section. Chris travels the globe in pursuit of his work, soaking up the local culture and sampling the very finest in cuisine, hotels and resorts for the magazine’s discerning readership. He also enjoys writing his fortnightly page on collectables, delving into the fascinating world of auctions and art, classic cars, coins, watches, wine and whisky investing.
You can follow Chris on Instagram.
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