007 Hang on, Little Potato
007 Hang on, Little Potato
A charming little root veggie and the Columbian Exchange.
1851 - 1907. After Seattle was founded, but before Pike Place Market.
This next section is supposed to start with the year 1851, but I need to go back about a hundred years to answer this question that I didn’t know I needed to answer until I started writing (because that’s what writing often does: reveals what you don’t know). How did the earliest European explorers influence Seattle’s modern culinary scene?
For this, we have to look to the Brits, the Spanish Conquistadors, Mexican explorers, and French and Russian fur traders.
I’ve been to La Push and I’ve been to Sequim. But I have never been to Neah Bay. It’s the northwestern most tip of the continental U.S. and home to the Makah1, another Indian tribe that makes up the Coast Salish people. It is also the place where European settlers first made camp in Washington state.
The Washington coast may have been explored as early as 1579, but it wasn’t until 1791 that Spanish explorer Salvador Hidalgo settled on the Washington coast at Neah Bay.2 The Spanish Conquistadors, accompanied by Mexican settlers, brought their agricultural practices with them, introducing potatoes, corn, and livestock. French and Russian influences were later introduced via the fur trading industry. However, food culture emanated outward from America’s indigenous people, too, bringing unique foods and culinary practices to the entire world.
Can you imagine Kansas without wheat fields, Italy without marinara sauce, or Spain without gazpacho? Wheat, tomatoes, chili peppers, and many other foods were transferred between the Old and New Worlds, the Eastern and Western Hemispheres, following Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas in 1492. This transfer of foods, as well as other plants, animals, humans, and diseases, is now known as the Columbian Exchange.
and
Food, in particular, was fascinating to Europeans in the New World, and descriptions of food, as well as indigenous cooking and eating practices, formed a large portion of travel accounts. While many plants and animals were recognizable, Europeans often noted that they seemed bigger and more vigorous in the Americas. Many victuals, however, were completely new to the explorers and later, the colonists. The exoticism of foods like corn and bananas was further heightened by the ways in which indigenous peoples prepared and consumed their food. Scores of accounts, both text and image, describe foods with which we are now familiar, like corn, potatoes, chili peppers, pumpkins, cassava, prickly pear, banana, cacao, turkey, and a wide variety of fish.
– Sarah Peters Kernan, Foods of the Columbian Exchange
Food culture emanated outward from America’s indigenous people, too, bringing unique foods and culinary practices to the entire world.
Without belaboring the span between European settlement and the founding of Seattle too much, suffice it to say that early British, Spanish, French, and Russian colonizers all had a hand in Seattle’s culinary evolution. Maybe the Russians brought vodka; the French, cassoulet3; the Spaniards, paella4; and the Brits, ummm…? Well, I’m not sure what the Brits contributed. When I think of Great Britain, good food is not the first thing that comes to mind. But maybe ales, brewing practices, and…tea?
I’ll leave you with this story of the Makah Ozette5, a charming little potato. Next time I’m at Pike Place Market, I will look for one.
After their conquests in South America the Spanish began a mission to further establish their empire on the western shores of North America. In the spring of 1791 they established a fort at Neah Bay and as accustomed a garden was planted that surely included potatoes they brought directly from South America or Mexico. Over the winter of 1791 the Spanish found the severe weather conditions at the forts harbor was unsafe for moorage of their vessels. The Spanish abandoned the fort in the spring of 1792.
The Makah people, who were in need of a carbohydrate source either traded or found volunteers of this rather weedy plant left in the garden of the abandoned fort. They quickly adopted the potato and became its stewards, growing it in their backyard gardens for over 200 years. Not until the late 1980’s was this potato catalogued and seed was grown outside the Makah Nation. There has to date been very limited commercial production of this potato although it is noted to be grown by a few small farmers in several regions of the U.S.A.
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