In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food (13 page)

The Root of Laziness

The potato crept into Europe like a leper, a hideously deformed root that some Spanish conquistador, after raping an Indian village, had stuffed into his pocket and forgotten. When the European elite finally saw it in the 1500s, they immediately decided that it was unsuitable for themselves—so different than its deliciously tanned cousin, the sweet potato!—but
perfect
for those porcine peasants. “The potato is rightly held responsible for flatulence,” remarked French scholar Denis Diderot in his influential eighteenth-century
Encyclopedie
. “But what is flatulence to the vigorous organs of peasants and workers?” The Russian aristocrats ordered their peasants to eat them. Italy’s Catholics urged the faithful to “try and try again . . . this delicious food.” The French published all-potato cookbooks. Only the English hesitated. “I would see all these labourers hanged,” wrote one of the nation’s most influential political thinkers in 1830, “and be hanged with them myself, rather than see them live upon potatoes.”

The author in question was William T. Cobbett, an illiterate peasant who became England’s most influential journalist by a unique combination of street savvy, demagoguery, and humor. When a member of Parliament referred to his paper,
The Political
Register,
as “two-penny trash,” Cobbett obligingly renamed it
Cobbett’s Two-Penny Trash
and watched the circulation increase. When one of his editorials got him imprisoned for treason, he simply ran the paper from his cell. His many loves, recorded in excruciating detail, included universal suffrage, turnips, and farming. His much more numerous hatreds included Shakespeare, paper money, tea, and, above all, that damned Irish potato. The Irish and the potato were inextricably woven together in the English thinking of the time, because while the rest of Europe still considered it pig food, the Irish had embraced the root like a brother. It usurped bread as the local staple. Men grew extra long thumbnails to facilitate the peeling. By the late 1700s the average Irish person was eating ten pounds of taters every day.

English Protestants like Cobbett thought this was disgusting. They believed wheat bread was the natural food of man and that its replacement with a dirty root was transforming the Irish into doglike creatures content to do nothing but sleep and fornicate. They dubbed it the “Lazy Root,” a slur that lives on in phrases like couch potato and potato head. Even drinking its cooking water could cause irreversible moral damage, according to Cobbett, and when his suggestion that it be banned from England was ignored, he urged workers to overthrow their government to stop the spread of this “depraved food.” At one point, protesting mobs of Londoners paraded before Parliament with potatoes stuck on sticks like political placards. This bizarre combination of anti-Irish racism and half-baked dietary philosophy may seem like lunacy, but as Larry Zuckerman points out in
The Potato
, the underlying situation was quite serious. A single acre of potatoes—the so-called “lazy bed”—provided an Irish family of six with enough to eat all year long. This gave the Irish peasant sufficient freedom from his gouging British landlords not only to enjoy life and make lots of little ’uns, but to wonder how he’d ended up a virtual slave in his own country. That combination boded ill for the British land barons who controlled Ireland. “So long as Ireland was only occupied by a million, or a million and a half, of starving wretches, it was a comparatively easy task to hold them in servitude,” wrote the prestigious
Edinburgh Review
in June 1822. “But, thanks to the Potatoe and the Cottage System, Ireland contains at this moment nearly
seven
millions of inhabitants . . . ,” making physical repression no longer practical.

Despite Cobbett’s occasional racist rants, he actually sympathized with the Irish because, like his own father, they were mainly small farmers. This love of the independent farming life is a constant theme in his writing, particularly a series of travelogues called
Cobbett’s Rural Rides
, that he penned while riding about England during the 1820s. The author jeers at ornamental bridges and the “unnatural” act of pruning trees. The “damnable system of paper money” is often criticized. But most of all, Cobbett wrote, beware of “the blasphemous cant of
sleek-headed
Methodist thieves that would persuade you to live upon
Potatoes
.” Near Crickdale, he reports seeing laborers living in hovels “the size of pig beds . . . digging up their little plots of
potatoes
. In my whole life I never saw Human Wretchedness equal to this.” Soon afterward, he rides his horse through Kensington where “cherry trees are in full bloom” and the children are the fattest, cleanest, best-dressed brats he’s ever seen. Why? “I have the very great pleasure to add, that I do not think I saw three acres of POTATOES in this whole tract of fine country.” Lest we doubt the vegetables’ deleterious affect on humanity, he reminds us it was the “devil himself . . . Sir Walter Raleigh, who (they say) first brought this root into England. He was beheaded at last! What a pity, since he was to be beheaded, the execution did not take place before he became such a mischievous devil. . . .”
¹

The story of Raleigh introducing the potato to England is probably rubbish—nobody knows how it got there—but Cobbett’s nay-saying proved prophetic. By the early 1800s, over one-third of the Irish population had been reduced to surviving on nothing but potatoes, and in some places potatoes had replaced hard currency. Then in 1845 the peasants dug up their “lazy roots” to find only a putrid-smelling black mass of gooey flesh where their crops ought to have been. Within two years 90 percent of the nation’s food supply lay rotting in the fields from potato blight, a previously unknown disease. The ensuing famine killed well over a million people. Another million fled the country. By the end of the century Ireland’s population had been cut in half.

Cobbett did not live to see his prophecies fulfilled. After being elected twice to the same Parliament that had once imprisoned him for treason, he passed away on his beloved farm in 1835. His obituary in the
London Times
called him “in some respects, a more extraordinary man than any other of his time.”

Potato Wars

It’s hardly surprising that at the same time the English wanted to ban the potato, their cousins in France were making its consumption a patriotic duty. The French government published all-potato cookbooks. They made planting it mandatory. Marie Antoinette even tried to give it some chic by wearing potato flowers in her hair. The most successful ploy, however, came from Auguste Parmentier. The eighteenth-century scientist, who dedicated his life to the potato, realized that while the peasants would never accept a tuber as a gift, they’d be more than happy to steal them. So he put a field of potatoes under twenty-four-hour guard. When the plants were ripe for transplanting, Parmentier ordered the guards to leave the field unattended overnight. The peasants swarmed in, stealing every plant and replanting them in their own gardens. The birth of the french fry. Parmentier’s efforts are memorialized in dishes like potatoes Parmentier, but it wasn’t until the tail end of the twentieth century that his beloved became truly fashionable via the
purée de pommes
de terre
(mashed potatoes) of Chef Joël Robuchon. Thanks to Robuchon, mashed potatoes became a “thing” among the French. Chefs like Jacques Barbery, of Paris’s Le Café Marly, came forward to proclaim their version superior because it was 49 percent butter and cream, compared to Robuchon’s miserly 25 percent, and had olive oil besides. The three-star chef of Burgundy’s La Côte D’Or, Bernard Loiseau, pointed out that he had been serving all-potato menus years before Robuchon. One French company started selling
pommes de terre
nurtured on seaweed for 3,000 francs a kilo (about $250 a pound). Robuchon’s Paris atelier closed in 1996, but his mashed potatoes live on at Japan’s Taillevent-Robuchon, where local gourmands enjoy the dish in a Loire chateau transported stone by stone all the way from France.

While some have suggested that the secret to the following version of Robuchon’s dish is its copious amounts of butter, the key is really the
la ratte
potato. Traditionally grown only in northern France, this breed became available in North America under the name
la princesse
in 1996. (Check the Endnotes for suppliers.)

Two pounds of potatoes, preferably
la princesse
(la ratte), all approximately the same size
Sea salt
One cup unsalted butter, chilled and cut into pieces
One cup whole milk

Wash the potatoes with their skins on and put them, whole, into a large pot. Cover with cold water, making sure to cover by at least an inch. Add salt, approximately one tablespoon per quart of water.

Simmer, uncovered, until done (about thirty minutes, or until a knife inserted into potato comes out easily).

Drain immediately and peel while still warm. Pass through a food mill set at the finest grind into a large saucepan set over low heat (alternatively, mash well and pass though a fine sieve, although this is not as good).

Stir vigorously to dry with a wooden spatula for five minutes and then start adding the butter piece by piece, stirring until each piece is incorporated, rather like making a
beurre blanc
sauce. The butter should be very cold.

Bring the milk to a boil and take off heat immediately. Incorporate into the purée slowly, stirring vigorously all the while until it is completely absorbed.

If you want the purée even finer, pass though a finemesh drum sieve. If stiff, add more hot milk and butter. Season to taste. Can be made an hour or so in advance. Keep warm in a double boiler.

The Last Drop

On the day of his funeral, men stood weeping on street corners. Some stockpiled supplies against the coming Holocaust. Others gave away their most cherished possessions, and ten thousand people lined the streets to watch the pallbearers carrying the coffin to where America’s most famous preacher waited to deliver the eulogy. But the most distraught of the mourners was a single man dressed as Lucifer, who stood by the great man’s coffin weeping and throwing himself to the ground in despair. “Good-bye John,” began the Reverend Billy Sunday at midnight. “You were the Devil’s best friend. I hate you with a perfect hatred. . . . The reign of tears is over! The slum will soon be a memory. We can soon turn the prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corn cribs. Men may walk upright, women will smile, and the children will laugh.”

The “man” in the coffin was John Barleycorn, the nickname for hard liquor, who “died” on January 17, 1920, the day the United States banned all forms of alcohol (that being the treasure men had been hoarding or giving away). Love or hate Prohibition, the fact that it happened verged on the miraculous. Westerners worship wine and adore beer, literally, because like all people we once believed that inebriating foods derived their power from resident spirits who would possess the imbiber. Hence our nickname “spirits” for hard liquor. This liquid divinity has been considered largely benign, if not divine, since the wine-drinking Dionysian cults of ancient Greece. Most cultures agreed on some level—ancient Babylonian law required the poor be supplied with “food to eat, and beer to drink”—but Europeans took it the furthest. Not only did they incorporate alcohol into all religious rites, but they made it a dietary staple comparable to milk. Beer thickened with eggs and poured over bread was the original continental breakfast and remained common in Germany until the mid-1700s. Beer for breakfast, ale for lunch, stout with dinner, and a few mugs in between. “People,” wrote Placutomus in 1551, “subsist more on this drink than they do on food.” The average northern European, including women and children, drank three liters of beer a day. That’s roughly two six-packs. People in positions of power, like the police, drank much more. Finnish soldiers enjoyed a ration of five liters of strong ale a day (the alcoholic equivalent of about six to eight six-packs, or about forty cans); monks in Sussex made do with twelve cans’ worth. Orgiastic drinking contests were part of most religious festivals and occurred almost twice a week. “They must swallow half, then all of a drink in one gulp without stopping to take a single breath,” wrote one German in 1599, “until they sink into a complete stupor . . . [then] the two heroes emerge and guzzle in competition with one another.” Drinking and toasting became so excessive that the British created a semi-official ban in the late 1700s that inspired the lyrics “drink to me only with thine eyes . . . and I’ll not ask for wine. . . .”

The fact that the most abusive drinking was in northern Europe led to a short-lived temperance movement there in the 1500s—a group of Germans who limited themselves to a mere seven glasses of wine per meal—but most of Europe staggered along as it always had. Doctors advised patients to drink themselves unconscious at least “once a month . . . as it stimulates general well-being,” and booze was so respectable that churches would ring their bells at ten and two to let workers know it was time for a drink. It wasn’t until the obviously horrible effects of alcohol on Native Americans that the first “dry state” was created by an Algonquin Indian leader in Canada; Chief Little Turtle of the Cherokee later convinced Thomas Jefferson to outlaw selling whiskey to his tribe. Although both these bans eventually failed, Christian leaders used these models, along with the image of the “murderous drunk” Indian, to promote the idea of an alcohol-free nation. This racial twist on Prohibition was amplified by sociologists like Arthur MacDonald, who claimed that white Americans, largely of northern European stock, “stand about midway between the maximum susceptibility of the American Indian [to liquor] and the minimum susceptibility of the Latin races” and thus required stringent laws to control their drinking.

The point argued most vigorously by American Prohibitionists was that banning alcohol would lead to a new era of prosperity. Worker production would increase, absenteeism would plummet, and, as Sunday said in his eulogy, “the slums would become a memory.” It seemed to work at first. Drinking decreased by as much as 80 percent in the early 1920s. After this initial drop, however, it started climbing again and, by the end of the ban a decade later, was approaching pre-Prohibition levels. Only now, people drank less beer because its bulk made it more difficult to hide. Illegal gin became the drink of choice, but it was of such poor quality that there was a 400 percent increase in deaths due to alcohol poisoning. “The government used to murder by the bullet,” commented comedian Will Rogers on the situation. “Now it’s by the quart.”

The prophesied death of sloth and crime proved equally elusive. While Prohibitionists crowed that they had stamped out “Blue Monday,” the day hungover workers would supposedly report sick en masse, it turned out that for some inexplicable reason, worker productivity actually
increased
with heavier drinking. The anticipated growth in savings accounts overflowing with money not spent on tipple also failed to materialize. Instead of creating more jobs and greater prosperity, Prohibition destroyed legitimate work situations and decimated the government’s tax revenues, according to sociologist Mark Thornton. Not that those people didn’t find work elsewhere: Prohibition was the midwife to serious organized crime in this country. In the first year of Prohibition, overall crime jumped 25 percent; by the end, violent crime rates had increased over 50 percent, largely because of crimes related to illegal drinking. As soon as the law was repealed in 1933, the crime level dropped back to pre-Prohibition levels. Instead of turning “the jails into corn cribs,” as Reverend Sunday had promised, the head of the Bureau of Prohibition, Henry Anderson, acknowledged that Prohibition had created “public disregard not only for this law, but for all laws.” The only industry that benefited was the prison system. Inmate populations jumped by 30 percent in the first two years, and, by 1930, half of all prisoners were doing time for drinking violations. Not surprisingly, the cost of the federal prison system budget rose 1,000 percent. It all sounds so strangely familiar.

In one sense, however, Reverend Sunday was dead right about Prohibition’s positive effect on national productivity. The first successful temperance societies in the 1800s were female church groups like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Although it was considered “unladylike” to be involved with politics, anti-alcohol campaigning was considered appropriate because it came from a “motherly” urge to protect children against drunken husbands. This union was eventually taken over by Frances Willard who, in 1875, connected temperance with a woman’s right to vote by arguing that “since women are the greatest sufferers of the rum curse, she ought to have the right [political power] to close the dram shop over her home.” Female Christian groups like these had long opposed giving themselves the vote, but when the wily Willard put the question to them in the so-called Home Protection Ballot, they bit. She then doubled the group’s membership, making it the largest in the world, and used its clout to make females fully enfranchised members of society.