FACTORALY - E9 POTATOES

Episode Date: October 26, 2023

Spuds. Dull or what? Well, or what, actually. It turns out there's a lot more to the humble potato than you'd expect. The duo totter towards a tater with a lot of tittle-tattle surrounding the Central American tuber. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

G'day Simon! G'day Bruce! Do you know what, I've been wanting to say G'day Bruce to you for a really long time because of the whole Monty Python sketch, but you're a very British English gentleman and therefore it doesn't seem right. Well, welcome to another edition of Fact Orally with me, Bruce Fielding. And me, Simon Wells. Hello. Welcome. We are professional voice artists, which is why we sound like this. Yes. Yes, yes.

Although, no. See, the thing is that we know these days that professional voice artists are meant to sound like wrong. Everyday, conversational, ordinary, bloke-next-door voice. Yes, the lovely, suave, sophisticated, look-at-me-I-know-everything voice is not quite so... No, I know. It's not as popular as it once was. But there you go. We can still do it for fun. Yeah.

So what are we going to be talking about this week, Simon? Well, this week, Bruce, we are going to be talking about potatoes, which, you know, is an obvious choice, isn't it? As soon as you think I'd like to listen to an interesting, cultural, factual podcast that's going to tell me lots of interesting and useful facts, you think potatoes don't you of course yes it's natural yes i i it occurred to me straight away the moment i thought of vodka uh potatoes i'll tell you what if you actually have written anything about moonshine that'd be great because i i just realized i didn't go down the alcoholic potato route so if you've got anything, that would be... I do. Oh, there we go. Great.

Well, we'll look forward to that. So, Bruce, what is a potato? It's a root vegetable. OK. It's a tuber, not like the ones that you play. It's a tuber in much the same way as a lot of stuff that grows under the ground is a tuber. Right, OK. And what is a tuber?

I don't know, actually. I didn't bother. Do you know what? I thought it was so obvious I didn't even bother to look it up. I did look it up. It's the swollen, fleshy part of an underground root system. Okay. Yeah, precisely. ground root system okay yeah precisely so obviously that means the the lumpy edible bit of a of a root vegetable so a potato a parsnip a turnip a swede those sort of thick fleshy bits are the bits you can eat um but at the same time i saw something online a little while ago that

said that's not a potato it's a tuber so i don't know what the difference is between the two if indeed there is one i think are they related to the tomato everything's related to the tomato in one way or another i have a suspicion that they are i vaguely remember them being slightly toxic in the same way that uh tomatoes are slightly toxic but i could be completely wrong well i think aren aren't they both indirectly related to nightshade? Yes, that's the reason why. And therefore they must be... I mean, everything is related to everything

by virtue of being organic matter. Are we related? I think so, yeah. Didn't your mother's first cousin have a thing with my grandfather's second cousin? We don't talk about that in the family. Fine's second cousin we don't talk about that in the family fine okay we don't talk about that um so yeah yes potatoes are related to nightshade and in fact when they first came to this country and to the rest of europe people were quite suspicious of them um and didn't want to eat them because they they thought they were

connected to nightshade nightshade has certain satanic, witchcrafty connections back in those days. I think the clue's in their name, isn't it, really? It's a bit of a giveaway, isn't it? Yeah. So you say they came here. Where did they come from? So they're indigenous to South America, essentially. There's evidence to suggest that they've been cultivated in Peru since about 5,000 or 6,000 BC. Wow. And that's where they stayed until Europe went and invaded South America and took all their silver and everything.

So this is conquistadors. They're sort of like the Spaniards bringing it back to Spain. So there are, with everything, there are conflicting issues. The Spanish say it was them. We say it was us. There's documentation to say that we both brought these things back. They weren't exclusive to anyone. Basically, anyone who went and invaded the Incas or the Andes brought these things back with them,

stuck them in the ground, and started growing them themselves. I think given that it's a Spanish name, potato or patata. Yeah. I think maybe they might have a former claim. But no, let's assume they're British. If we screw up our eyes tightly and believe it, then it must be true. Yeah. I heard that it was that the Spanish Basque farmers in Spain

were the first people to grow from Europe. Okay, okay. And that actually they came over in the early 1500s, but Walter Raleigh claimed to have introduced them to Ireland in the late 1500s, about 1589. Didn't Drake also claim something? Oh, quite possibly. Basically, all the famous British sailors and explorers said,

nope, that was me, I did that. Walter Rye smoking his potatoes. Right, yeah, I'm glad you said that. I was exactly thinking of an episode of Blackadder. Oh, heck, can I test my memory of blackadder quotes now? Something along the lines of, he's making a fortune out of these things. People are smoking them, building houses out of them. They'll be eating them next.

So, yeah, so Raleigh's sort of introduced potatoes to Ireland. So what's so good about a potato is that they're very easy to grow. Are they? They are incredibly easy to grow. A lot easier than wheat. So if you want carbs, you can get them various different ways. But wheat is a bit of a bugger.

You have to process it and all sorts. Whereas a potato, you can basically lift out of the ground, boil and then eat. It's really easy. That's fairly simple, isn't it? Yeah. You put it it in you take it out and that's what it's all about yes okay fair enough actually we talked we talked about um the the nightshade aspect of it i have in my head that they used to eat the they used to eat the flowers and throw the potatoes away

oh really yes and then they and then they got very ill because they were eating nightshade yeah it was only until somebody worked to actually know what you do is you throw that bit away keep the keep the tuber go for the other works okay i think i'd read that um that they they were nicknamed the devil's apples isn't that nice the devil's dumplings dumplings. No, that's something. That again, that's Blackadder again. Sorry about that. Oh, we should do an entire episode on Blackadder.

But talking of carbs, I mean, they are easier to grow than wheat. And in fact, they give you more calories. They give you something like, for weight, for weight, they give you nearly four times the calories of wheat in a potato. Come on, that's a lot more calories, in a potato. That's a lot more calories. It is a lot more calories. So they're easy to grow. They're easy to dig up.

They provide a lot of calories. They're quite cheap. And this is presumably all of those things together led them to being such the staple food stuff that they became. And especially amongst the sort of the working lower classes, these things became an absolute dietary must, didn't they? I think they did. I think that there were reasons why, if you're a king or an emperor or something like that, what you want is a large number of people in your population so that you can have a

large army. Yes. And a large army means you have more territory and more power and all that stuff to get a larger army you need to be able to feed your people enough so that they breed and give you um more people to fuel your army okay and then when you've got a larger army you need to feed that army too yes yes um there's a lovely i think it's apocryphal but i love the story about frederick of prussia right who was desperately people would not eat potatoes at all in germany surprising when you think about how many like kartoffelsalat and all

that stuff that the germans eat now yeah sure but frederick the great uh of prussia decided that he needed his people to eat potatoes but he couldn't convince them to eat them because it's like as you said it was like the food of the devil and all that stuff was terrible stuff so what he did was he planted a a garden uh sort of like a kitchen garden planted potatoes and called them the royal vegetable. And he told his soldiers to guard the garden with the royal vegetables, but not very well. So that people could get in and nick these royal vegetables, which were supposed to be amazing.

And so lots of people nicked the royal veg and grew potatoes. And that was how he managed to distribute potatoes amongst the population of Germany. There's nothing like a good bit of press or marketing, is there? Just to completely change the fortunes of an unwanted product. OK, so potatoes have become prolific. They've become a real staple. They've even become a royal food. I read a lovely article written in 1785 by a chap called... I've not written his name down.

That's his name. Isn't it interesting? Yeah. But I've not written his name down. Wrote an article in a paper called the Bon Jardinier, the Good Gardener. And he wrote, there is no vegetable about which so much has been written and so much enthusiasm has ever been shown than the potato. That's quite a good endorsement. I'd say so.

I guess because it's so versatile. Yeah. There's only so many things you can do with a carrot. Stop it! But, you know, there are, you can roast it or boil it or chuck it, chop it up into a salad, and that's pretty much it for a carrot. Yeah, I suppose so. Whereas a potato you can do all sorts of things with. Come on, let's

off the top of our head, let's name some things that you can do with a spud. Julienne. Mashed. Boiled. Chips. or for our american listeners fries roast crisps or for our american listeners chips baked did we say potato salad oh no we didn't potato salad very good uh weaponry Very good. Weaponry. Not where I thought that was going. Talk about that for a bit. Firing from cannons. If you run out of shot, potatoes are very useful to fire at your enemies.

Really? Yes. They hurt a lot. I would imagine they would. Especially the small Jersey Royals. Like stick a few of those. It's basically shrapnel. Yes. Okay. Yes.

Yes. So we're likening a nice big King Edward to a cannonball and little Charlottey whatever he is to shrapnel. Yes, I think so. That seems reasonable. Do you have documented evidence of this occurring? I have read it. Yes? I have read it, yes. I have read of firing. Well, although, actually, when I was a child,

there was a thing called a spud gun. Oh, yeah, true, spud guns. Yeah, yeah. Which I guess that is a weapon that uses a potato. It's one of those ones where you basically stick the nozzle of the gun into a potato, which makes a small cylinder of potato. And then it uses air to sort of fire this small cylinder of potato at your friends or family. I've always meant to try a spud gun.

I've never got round to it. Do you still have one? I don't still have one, but I remember fondly using one in my youth many, many, many, many years ago. Having been to your house, you strike me as the sort of man who might just happen to have a spud gun laying around. Hanging around somewhere. I remember it was blue. Well, OK, fine. Isn't that weird? I can actually remember the colour of my spud gun.

Wow. Name of your first musical album when it finally happened. So potatoes have become more and more prolific. By the beginning of the 19th century, it had officially replaced the turnip as Britain's favourite and most popular vegetable. So the turnip was before the potato, it was the turnip? Yeah, yeah. The turnip was the root vegetable of choice in these lands. I have to say it. You know I have to say it. Go on. That's a turnip for the books.

Where's my mini drum kit? I don't have one. I'll insert a drum kit sound effect later. So Britain's favourite vegetable became the potato. Yes, having been the turnip for however long. Yes, it just sort of shows us to how prevalent the potato had become. That in Ireland in the 1840s, there was a particular disease going around called the potato blight. And, you know, potatoes were so, so systematically part of the everyday diet that when that one single crop failed, you know,

nothing else was particularly going wrong in the harvest, just the potatoes, one million people in Ireland died because of that potato blight. Yes, that was a mould of some sort that attacked the potato. Yeah, it was. And I think a million people died, and another million people buggered off to America. Were displaced, yeah, exactly. So hence the diaspora of Ireland was massively spread through the spread of this disease in the potato crop.

And apparently it took years for Ireland to recoverland to recover from this blight i bet and and one of the main reasons for them growing so many potatoes in ireland uh was that most of ireland was owned by english people and it was a nice cheap way of feeding your your peasants oh great yes we have a if our listeners can't tell we have an an interesting relationship with our country of England. We're terribly proud to be English. And then every now and then we sort of hang our heads in shame. Yes. It's like being in love with someone that, you know, is hateful occasionally. Hmm. Yeah. Good analogy. So, yes, so the reason why the English insisted on the Irish growing potatoes was, again, for this sort of high calorific, cheap way. And it was the same reason why armies tended to be fed potatoes a lot and also to grow potatoes on the way.

So on the way to battles, they would plant potatoes so that when they were coming home, they had something to eat. Oh, brilliant. Because they grow really fast as well. Do they? Mm. Ah. I've grown them in my back garden. Have you?

OK. How long does it, so from planting to digging up, how long are we talking? I vaguely remember it being sort of quite quick, like sort of four or five months. Oh, really? Yeah. Ah, OK. Not sort of the multiple years that you expect. No, no, no.

You know, when you find a potato at the back of the vegetable store that's got eyes and stuff growing out of it, you just stick it in the ground and it grows. Gosh, that is simple, isn't it? Yeah, it's really, really simple. So potato names. I had a quick look at a couple of potato names. They all seem to have interesting names.

I haven't got time to talk about them all, but I looked at the two most popular ones in this country, at least. Can you name those? Maris Piper and King Edward. Very good. Give that man a gold star. Is that right? It is. Oh, wow. Those are the two most popular potato varieties in Great Britain.

Very good. Wow. There we go. The King Edward potato was, I was going to say launched, going back to the canon again, was bred, there we go, was bred and created in 1902 by a fellow called John Butler from Lincolnshire. And that was the same year as the coronation of King Edward VII.

So he named it the King Edward potato. Simple as that. Gosh, that makes sense. Yeah. The Maris Piper you mentioned was first bred in the 1950s by the Plant Breeding Institute of Cambridgeshire. And whoever grows the breed gets to name it. And it was named after Maris Lane, which was the name of the road that the institute was based on. And then the grower's son was given the option to come up with the second name and he went Piper.

So there's the Marist Piper. But you can do an awful lot of stuff with potatoes, can't you? You can make them into all sorts of things. And one of the things you can make them into, as you alluded to at the front, was crisps or chips. Yes. Fattening thin slices that have been cooked in oil. Yes.

Or these days they air fry them and things like that. Do you know what is the most famous crisp chip in the world? In terms of brand? Yes. I would say Walker's. That's because you're British. What would you say if you were American? I would probably say Lay's.

Ah. Oh, no, that say lays. Ah. Oh, no, that's Australian. Yes. In fact. Kettle? No, you're going through them all. You're doing very well with lots and lots of crisp names.

But the big one that you've forgotten, which is the hyperbolic paraboloid. I love a hyperbolic paraboloid in the morning. I love a tube of hyperbolic paraboloids. We're talking about Pringles, aren't we? We're talking about Pringles. Of course. Pringles are amazing. Yes. They were invented, they're quite recent though.

I mean, you know, we've been talking about thousands of years of the potato. Yeah. And Pringles were invented in about 1967. Really? Yeah. As recent as that. Okay. There was a chemist

called Frederick Bauer. Oh, not Pringle? Yeah. I know, it's weird, isn't it? Oh, what a shame. Well, there was a Mr. Pringle, but the guy, the chemist who invented it,

who put it all together, was a chap called Frederick Bauer. Right. And he is technically known as a hyperbolic paraboloid. Yes, it is. And they used computers in 1967 to work out how best to shape crisps. But the idea was that the aerodynamics of that hyperbolic paraboloid would actually keep them intact because because this guy fred was really upset that when he bought a bag of crisps there were lots of broken ones in the bag right so he

um he he created this shape and and the tube itself as well yes in which he was buried he wasn't he but uh frederick bauer who invented the pr, was buried in a Pringles tube. His children were on the way to collect his ashes. And they were chatting amongst themselves. Wouldn't it be fun to bury dad in a Pringles tube? And they discussed which flavor. Because there are an awful lot of flavors. He'd have to be the original, wouldn't he?

Well, they eventually plumped for the original Pringles. I support that. And they put some of his ashes in a Pringles tube and buried the Pringles tube. Well, that seems quite fitting. Yeah, I think so. But there are an awful lot of, I mean, the flavors of a Pringles. There's some very weird ones. Serrano ham. Really?

Eggs Benedict. Crab. Hot dog. Salted salted caramel, tortilla cinnamon. There's just so many different... Where on earth do you go shopping, Bruce? Well, I go to this very specialist shop called The World of Pringles. Oh, right. I had no idea.

I think I could probably name original sour cream and chive paprika barbecue. And that would be it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's even a prawn cocktail one. I mean, I know that people think that prawn cocktail crisps are like exclusive to the UK. But there is actually a prawn, apart from the crab Pringle, there is actually a prawn cocktail Pringle. Is there? Which is fabulous. And I mentioned crisps. This is interesting.

They were called crisps in America because they weren't allowed to call them chips because they weren't pure potato. They had things like wheat and rice in them. Right. Yes, because they're sort of a potato chip is a thinly sliced potato, whereas Pringles and not Monster Munch,

that's made out of a maze. But those sorts of things are reformed, shaped, mashed potato starch, aren't they? Yes, hula hoops, things like that. Yes. Anything that's got a funny shape to it. Yes. So they weren't allowed to call them chips, so they called them crisps. Right.

There is a museum in Idaho which has the world's largest Pringle. Ooh, go on. Which is 25 inches. My goodness. It's a 25-inch Pringle that was actually made the right way. Crikey. That's a heck of a Pringle. That is one heck of a Pringle.

But there are loads of potato museums. Are there? There are loads and loads. I mean, as you'd expect, there are ones in Germany, obviously. Sure. There's the Deutsches Kartoffelmuseum. Right. But also, don't forget, you know, one of the great places for chips, for fries, is Belgium.

Okay, yes. Getting a plate of mussels and fries is kind of like yeah de rigueur and there are there are actually two museums of potatoes in belgium are they really wow there's even one in lithuania huh wonder if anyone's ever been to the mall has anyone out there got a particular potato interest who's made? If anybody wants to go and visit all of the potato museums in the world, we will happily publish your blog on our website. Thank goodness. For a minute I thought you were going to say we'll happily pay for you to do it.

No, God no. Come on, they're everywhere from Austria, Canada, Germany, US, all over the shop. That would be very generous, wouldn't it? We'll have to get sponsorship to do things like that. Now, you mentioned Belgium there. French fries aren't French, are they? Are they not? No.

So French fries are, in fact, from? It depends who you ask. They go back to Belgium to at least the 1700s they might go back to spain to the 1600s but it's one of those cases where there are written uh written accounts of eating pieces of fried potato but that's not quite specific enough to say that they were the stick shape that we recognize as being French fries. So they could be Spanish, but they are at least definitely Belgium. And there are a couple of stories as to why they became called French fries. One is that British troops during the First World War saw some French people eating these fries, and because they saw them being eaten by the French,

they assumed they were French, hence French fries. what's more likely is that there's um there's actually a method of cooking or preparing vegetables called Frenching which is close to Julienne and um in 1802 there's a document relating to Thomas Jefferson in America and it says he served potatoes served in the French manner at the White House at dinner one day. So they were therefore French fried potatoes, you know, potatoes that were fried in the French style. So there's French fries. Obviously, there's quite a difference between French fries and British chips. Chips are a very big industry over here. One of our famous British meals is fish and chips. Chips are a very big industry over here. One of our famous British meals is fish and chips. Absolutely. Absolutely. Do you know how many portions of fish and chips are served each

year in the UK? I do not, Simon, but you do. I do. 382 million. Wow. Which I was really surprised that it's not more than that, because how... I don't actually know off the top of my head what the population of Britain is at the moment. It's about 65, 70 million, something like that. Is it? Okay. So that would imply that we're only eating about five portions of fish and chips each a year, which if my intake is anything to go by is inaccurate.

Yes. Do you know what the most famous potato is? No. It's Mr. Potato Head. Oh, I do love how you take us down these little random avenues. You think you know where you're going and then Bruce turns up. Go on then, tell us about Mr. Potato Head. So Mr. Potato Head was actually invented in the early 50s. And it was the first toy advertised on television. Was it really? And it was the first campaign aimed at children rather than before that commercials were aimed at their parents. It was quite a vicious thing, this thing.

It had sharp points on it so that it could go into the potato quite easily right and there were basically bits of uh you know mouth and eyes yeah nose effectively that was it really basically um but then about a year later they brought out mrs potato head and then there were brothers and sisters and all sorts of things. And then it started to roller coaster into all sorts of other things. They had boats and cars and things for Mr. Potato Head.

In about 10 years, about 1964, they included a plastic potato body with the Mr. Potato Head. So that became like the Mr. Potato Head is now that thing that we recognize in Toy Story and things like that as Mr. Potato Head. Because of how prolific those movies are, I think I had somehow forgotten that Mr. Potato Head used to be based on a potato. Yes.

Rather than a plastic potato. Absolutely. Yes. And his name, in case you ever got asked, what's his name, Mr Potato Head? His name is Jason. Is it? It is Jason. I would never have assumed he had a first name. Jason Potato Head. Jason Potato Head. That doesn't seem right. I know. His first name is Mr. So I found out that the cheese and onion flavour crisp was invented by an Irish fellow called Joe Spud Murphy in 1954. And he owned a company called Tato, which is still a popular brand in Ireland so this was established

in in 1954 at a time when crisps didn't have any flavoring at all you know they were just plain and unless you had a bag of smiths which had a little blue sachet of salt inside that you could sprinkle in but this gentleman spotted a niche in the market to create a crisp that was already flavoured. So he set up this factory, started off with ready-salted, and then moved on to other things. And hey, presto, you've got cheese and onion crisps, which are my personal favourite, I have to say. Do they actually contain any cheese whatsoever? Now, there's a question.

I watched a fascinating programme a while ago about how they put flavors in things. And you do actually start off with the thing that the flavor is based around. Okay. So in order to make cheese and onion flavoring, you get some cheese and an onion and put them together in some kind of chamber. And then you sort of siphon off the air from around it, which contains minuscule little chemicals of flavour and smell, and then you just replicate that. You put it through a spectrometer of some sort. Go on then, why not?

Let's say yes. Now, Bruce, have you ever heard of the annual Fliton potato race? No, Simon, I have never heard of the annual Fliton potato race. What is the annual Fliton potato race? No Simon, I have never heard of the annual Fliton potato race. What is the annual Fliton potato race? So every year the village of Fliton in Bedfordshire holds a charity race where people from all around gather together, they put on their little marathon style numbers on their vests and they have a race through the surrounding countryside whilst carrying a sack of potatoes. And there are different grades or classes within this race.

You can either carry a 2kg, 5kg, 10kg or 20kg sack of potatoes whilst doing this race. So handicapping? Pretty much, yeah. And all of the proceeds go to a different local charity each year. So there you go. That's the Fliton annual potato race. Excellent.

Well, that's a nice thing to do. I mean, I think that the British have a very good record for these completely stupid daft races. Well, I don't know about you, Bruce, but I think I have run out of spud-related trivia. We've told you what they are, how to serve them. Where they come from, how they're grown. We've told you everything that we currently know.

Well, so why don't you tell us stuff by commenting? And then if you really like this kind of a thing, you could like it. Like it. Subscribe to it. Tell your friends about this wonderful show, if indeed you think it's wonderful. If you think it's terrible, tell them about it anyway, because they might disagree. Yes. But either way, thank you so much for listening

to another episode of Factorily. What we could do, actually, is we could do a mash-up of all the shows that we've done. A mash-up? Is that a potato pun? Yes. Well done for chipping that in. Right, time to say goodbye.

Goodbye. Goodbye.