Because the tubers grow underground, the conquistadors who took them home to Spain called them truffles. Those tubers are not roots, but "lumpy" stems in which the plant hoards its starch supply.
Since the potato is a member of the deadly nightshade family, its leaves and berries do, in fact, possess some of the narcotic and poisonous characteristics common to the clan. But, as long as the tubers are not exposed to light for any length of time, they remain quite innocuous. Still, the very fact that they grow under the earth made them seem unclean, somehow unholy! At one time, they were even believed to cause leprosy.
The potato, called "papa" by the Incas, probably received its later name because it was confused with the sweet potato, an unrelated plant known as "batatas".
The potato was so important to the Incas that they calculated their units of time by how long it took a potato to cook. They often freeze-dried the tubers to make a flour called "chuno" or brewed them into a beer called "chica."
In the Old World, however, the potato remained for some time a delicacy for the rich--and was even considered an aphrodisiac! That is probably why Shakespeare's Falstaff adjured the sky to rain the vegetable. The vegetable was still such a novelty when Gerard published his herbal in 1597 that the frontispiece of the book pictured him holding a spray of the plant.
It didn't reach Ireland until 1663, but the peasants on that island adopted it wholeheartedly. Due to the constant wars there, they often saw the rest of their crops ravaged by soldiers. But the underground tubers, frequently overlooked by the raiders, saved many a longsuffering family from starvation. An old Irish saying asserts that "only two things in this world are too serious to be jested on--potatoes and matrimony." Ireland became too dependent on the potato, however--so much so that when a blight devastated the crop from 1845 to 1848, a million people starved. Another desperate million fled the country for America.
The potato, which stands for "benevolence" in the Language of Flowers, had become a staple there as well. In fact, Thomas Jefferson had introduced what would seem to us a very modern dish--"pomme-frites" or French fries--in the 1700's. Today we eat approximately 120 pounds of potatoes per person per year.
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