Virtual Grub Street: Let the sky rain potatoes!

Drawing of the sweet potato
from Gerard's Herbal (1597)

On This Topic:

Let the Sky Rain Potatoes;
What Color Were Shakespeare’s Potatoes?

The journalist Gwynn Guilford has written an article [link] recently on the enormous cultural impact of the potato. It seems that “white people” have dominated the world because of that tuber. Certainly, it had more than a little help from a number of other factors.

Corn, she she informs us, had a much easier time of it.

When brought back to Europe, potatoes weren’t an easy sell at first. Unlike the other important New World crop, maize, their appeal wasn’t immediately obvious. At first, the European upper class hailed potatoes as aphrodisiacs. (This explains why Shakespeare’s perpetually horny buffoon Falstaff bellows, “Let the sky rain potatoes!”)

To keep our interest up, she includes a quote from Shakespeare that has been used to decorate more than one account about the tuber.

But, actually, Falstaff was referring to the sweet potato. The mistake is understandable as Guilford has all but cut-and-pasted a considerable portion of the Wikipedia article on the “History of the Potato,” including its blithe ignorance of what it meant that the first known mention of the potato is a shipping document that shows its point of embarkation as the Canary Islands. The islands had just the right climate to grow sweet potatoes and did a booming business for the century or two that the delicacy joined bananas as their cash crops.

While the white potato (to which Guilford refers) was introduced to Europe only some 20 years later than the sweet potato it took well over a century before it even began to be a staple crop in Ireland. This regardless that it was indeed the perfect crop for the British climate. Even in chilly Britain, white potatoes grow like… well… potatoes. The yield per acre is high in terms of the number of spuds and even higher in terms of nutriment. It is a member of the nightshade family, however, and it is said that this is the reason that it languished for so long. People were afraid that it (and its cousin the tomato) were poisonous as the “deadly nightshade” they had learned to avoid. Others attribute the slow dispersion of potato farming to the bitter taste.

It was the sweet potato that was considered an aphrodisiac (never the white potato). Almost certainly because it had (like that other aphrodisiac, the cucumber) a vaguely phallic shape. It could not have hurt the reputation that it had to be grown in the Canary Islands or Spain and shipped to upper class tables. Those who can afford to buy expensive foods, of course, tend to enhance the aphrodisiac qualities.

As I have mentioned, in my book Edward de Vere’s RetainerThomas Churchyard: the Man Who was Falstaff, the sweet potato is just another item in Falstaff’s world, like fowling pieces, Bilbo swords, Banbury cheese, and sack, etc., that did not exist until well after the time of Prince Hal (King Henry V). Neither did the old poet-soldier exist until well after that time. He, like his trappings, lived resoundingly in the mid to late 16^th century.

In fact, the sweet potato had only just begun to be a delicacy within the reach of splurging poets and playwrights and members of the middle classes at the time that The Merry Wives of Windsor (the play from which Falstaff is quoted) was written. The old soldier liked to keep abreast of the new fads.

There is one more mention of the potato in Shakespeare. This one, from the play Troilus and Cressida, is even more curious:

Thersites. How the devil Luxury, with his fat rump and potato-finger, tickles these together! Fry, lechery, fry!

The Sweet potato variety we see in Gerard’s 1597 Herbal is not a particularly apt comparison to a finger (even a nice fat male finger). Its roots, on the other hand, would have been about the right size, but we would seem to have no other record that they, too, were considered edible much less aphrodisiac.

It is difficult to avoid the possibility that fried slices, or longer, thinner varieties, of sweet potato might have been called “potato-fingers” as early as the 1590s. (More than one commentator is confident that the reference is common slang for the penis.) Gerard, our only authority on the matter, has some interesting things to say that we will explore as we proceed to investigate in our second part: “Shakespeare’s Annotators and the Saga of Potato Commentary”.