On Tatties, briefly
One hot potato that changed the world.
Potatoes, or tatties as I prefer to refer to them, were introduced to Europe by the Spanish in the 16th century and that was that. Tatties and mince, tatties as chips, tattie scones, crisps, tatties on top of your pies, tatties with a roast, baked tatties, haggis, neeps and tatties and all the tattie dishes I’m forgetting, including macaroon which I maybe forgot on purpose because I’m suspicious of it (for those of you unfamiliar, it’s a fondant sweetie coated in chocolate and toasted coconut and the fondant inside is mashed tatties and sugar. It’s actually nice because I’m pretty sure there’s more sugar than tattie but it still freaks me out).
Potatoes are a huge part of our lives (the Lab Assistant has become very eloquent in his pronunciation of “chips”, usually followed by “sausis”. I swear I feed that kid healthy food but that dish is the one that stuck) and if we hadn’t cultivated them from a single origin somewhere between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago, I can only wonder what we would eat instead.
Potato plants are perennial (they come back every year… for two or more years) and herbaceous (they don’t have sticks that stick around in the winter) and they use the potato part to store energy for the plant. The potato is not a root, but is in fact a modified stem, much like how a breast lobule is a modified sweat gland I guess.
You get wild potatoes across the pond in the Americas where they originated, now spread from the southern United States all the way to southern Chile. I’m sure there are a whole bunch of wild potato varieties that grow all over the world now, but I have it from a bunch of reliable sources that that’s their home. They were domesticated from a single species, which if I understand correctly would have been one of twenty or so morphologically similar species that make up the Solanum brevicaule complex. As discussed previously, plants are not my strength, so do clarify this in the comments if I have it wrong, but please, for the sake of a poor artist whose fingers were designed to hold pencils and haven’t a hint of green anywhere about them, be gentle.
I can’t think of a clever segway into this next bit of news because I really need a holiday, and fortunately, I’m having one. We’re off to Arran for a Big Birthday Celebration (not mine) next week, and I wanted a creative endeavour for my holiday. I’ve decided to try and fill a wee pocket sketchbook with observational drawings and working ideas (field notes?) so I will share a few of my favourite pages with you in the next newsletter. If you are a gorgeous paying subscriber you can flick through the whole thing with me, plus we’ll get this month’s digital download, which is very thematic with next week’s fact. It might be a bit of a later newsletter next week, what with the whole getting-on-a-ferry and being-on-a-different island thing, but I’m quite excited about next week’s one and I think it will be worth an extra wait.
Meanwhile, enjoy your tatties!