What Color Were Shakespeare’s Potatoes?

Batata Hispanorum. 
John Gerarde's Herbal (1597)

On This Topic:

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

When I posted my piece “Let the sky rain potatoes!” on Falstaff’s reference to the New World vegetable in The Merry Wives of Windsor I was reminded by one of my readers that the Sweet Potato proper was not orange in color.  While she only felt I had left the impression, however much I had not said as much, her comment sent me looking for early information on the tuber.

What did witnesses say about the potato when it was first discovered in South and Central America?  There turned out to be a small but descriptive literature on the plant during the waning years of the 16^th century.  Some was wrong, some was inexact and some was highly informative.

By the year 1599-1600, when Shakespeare’s play would seem to have been written, the potato was available in London.  It was considered a delectable treat and an aphrodisiac.  But the tuber referred to by the name was not the potato-proper as we know it now. 

The White Potato had indeed been introduced a mere 20 years after the Sweet Potato and was available at least throughout Northern Europe.  But persistent attempts to introduce it into areas with overburdened soil, in England and Ireland, would take more than 100 years still to bear fruit.  The flavor is not a pleasant one.  The means of cooking were unfamiliar as were recipes that might mitigate the natural bitterness.  These factors together with the fact of the close similarity of the above-ground flower to the fearful, poisonous Nightshade (to which the White Potato is, indeed, related), assured the tuber would be given a wide berth.

The literature regarding South American flora was pretty much entirely in Latin and Spanish.  The authors generally gathered their information by observing specimens transplanted in Spain.  Of course, preparation and eating could be observed first hand.

To add to the difficulties of searching out 16^th century information, even those sources who saw the flora first hand, in Peru,[1] and the surrounding areas, such as the Jesuit Joseph de Acosta, received much of their information from the accounts of others.  There was no standardized science of description.  Acosta was thorough when he gave his list of the types of potato[2] but had no idea what characteristics properly identified plants as belonging to the family.  Some of the tubers he describes are not potatoes.  It takes an extra round of research to verify that Falstaff’s (Sweet) Potato was indeed the camote.

Two earlier accounts of the potato, by authors who had gleaned their knowledge in Europe, never having traveled to the New World, are actually more precise and to our point.  Chapter XVIII, De Batatas, of the great botanist Charles de l'Écluse’s Rariorum aliquot stirpium per Hispanias obseruatarum… (1576) informs the reader that all varieties of the potato root  were white.  The skins of the roots were various colors, generally shades of red and purple, white and off-white.[3]

L’Ecluse may also have been the first to record that the potato was customarily baked in coals, cut into slices and dipped in Falstaff’s favorite wine by way of relish, sack![4]  This also clarifies the only other reference to potatoes in Shakespeare.

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

In Troilus and Cressida [or, more precisely, in Ulysses and Agamemnon (1584)[5]] Thersites refers to a “potato-finger”.  Also in the London of 1584, it would seem, potatoes were customarily cut into strips popularly called potato-fingers.

In his Coronica y historia general del hombre (1598), Doctor Ivan Sanchez Valdez de la Plata described the external color of the potato as “tawny”.[6]  Apparently never having seen a potato, however, or any of the exotic plants discovered in the New World, it is difficult to be sure it is not just another of the many errors in his book.

The entry on Batatas in the Herbario Nuovo (1585), an Italian Herbal by Castore Durante, on the other hand, is delightfully precise.  The inside of a potato is white it bluntly declares.  Happily, he also describes how the root is eaten: cooked in the midst of hot coals, sliced in long thin pieces and dipped in wine and sugar.[7]  Falstaff, of course, prefers his sack with sugar.

The famous English herbalist, John Gerarde has a good deal to say about the potato.  His information, however, is tangential to our subject and requires a short essay of its own.  

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[1] The Natural & Moral History of the Indies, By Father Joseph De Acosta. Reprinted From The English Translated Edition Of Edward Grimston, 1604. Haklyut Society, 1880.  This edition includes a brief biography of Acosta.  He lived in South America and Mexico from 1571-1587.

[2] Acosta, Joseph.  Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1598). 242.  “Las que agora me ocurren, vltra delas Papas áfon lo principal, fon ocas, y yanaocas, y camotes, y vatatas, y xiquimas, y yuca, y cochuchu, y cavi, y totora, y mani, y otros cuen generos que no me acuerdo.”

[3] Clusius Atrebatensis, Carolus [Charles de l'Écluse].  Rariorum aliquot stirpium per Hispanias obseruatarum ... (1576). 297.  “colore externo inter sé differentia,… aut cortex externus rubescit siue purpurascit… aut pallet, aut candidùs est: omnes verò radices, intus albæ.”

[4] Clusius, 299. “praefertim si cineribus cocta & exteriore pelle repurgata & in talleolas sécta ex pauxillo vino, stillaticique, rosàrum liquoris & sácchari momento edatur.”

[5] Purdy, Gilbert Wesley.  Ulysses and Agamemnon (1584).  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JD7KM1T.

[6] Sanchez Valdez, Ivan.  Coronica y historia general del hombre : en que se trata del hombre en comun, de la diuision del hombre en cuerpo y alma, de las figuras monstruosas de los hombres, de las inuenciones dellos, y de concordia entre Dios y el hombre. (1598). 128. “la corteza de encima, que es aspera, y de color leonada”.

[7] Durante, Castore.  Herbario Nuovo (1585). 66.  “Mangiasi questa radice tenera cruda, cotta sotto la cenere monda, & tagliata in pezzetti con vino, acqua rosa, & zuccaro, quero con olio aceto, & sale.”  Durante himself prefers to eat it dipped in vinegar and salt.

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

• The Fascinating Itinerary of the Gelosi Troupe, 1576.  June 10, 2019.  “The Spanish soldiers had not been paid and unpaid soldiers tend to rob and loot.  The citizens were prepared to give them a fight.  Violent flare ups were occurring everywhere.”
• A Thousand Years of English Terms.  June 2, 2019.  ‘One person did not say to another, “Meet you at three o’clock”.    There was no clock to be o’.  But the church bell rang the hour of Nones and you arranged to meet “upon the Nones bell”.’
• A Most Curious Account of the Funeral of Queen Elizabeth I: April 28, 1603.  April 28, 2019.  “Once it was clear that James I would face no serious challenges, Cecil and the others could begin to give attention to the matter of the Queen’s funeral.”
• The Battle Over Shakespeare's Early and Late Plays. September 24, 2018. “The answers to the post-Oxford dilemma, of course, are three.”
• Stratford Shakespeare’s Undersized Grave.  July 22, 2018.  “Mr. Coll’s considers this evidence to support an old rumor that Shakspere’s head had been stolen in 1794.  But I submit that he is merely making his observation based upon a coincidence.”
• Check out the English Renaissance Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.