One could fill a Finnegan's wake with Irish food words that strike us as silly--panhaggerty and colcannon, boxty and balnamoon skink--but most of them are just mangled Gaelic, and unlikely to come up too often, even on St. Paddy's. The potato, on the other hand, is essential to Irish food (these days), a staple food for a lot of the world, and contains a story of discovery, confusion, and division in its three popping syllables.

The potato's history is really a tale of two tubers, both born in New World dirt. What we know as a potato began in Peru, where it fed the Inca empire and residents of the Andean altiplano going back at least 7,000 years. The region still has the highest potato diversity in the world, and even has an ancient method for freeze-drying spuds, which are then called chunos, in the cold air of high-altitude nights.

The sweet potato, which belongs to a different species entirely, started out in the tropical warmth of the stretch of Central America between the Yucatan and the Venezuelan highlands. And by the time Columbus hit the Caribbean, the sweet potato had become a standard part of the region's diet.

So when Christoforo needed to load up on food to make the journey back to the Old Country, he piled batatas--a native Caribbean word for sweet potatoes, probably from somewhere near modern-day Haiti--into his ships' holds. Soon after, they were being grown in Spain and other warm parts of Europe, and sweet potatoes, which one English journeyer from 1565 said "be the most delicate rootes that may be eaten, and doe far exceede our passeneps or carets," had entered English as the plain "potato."

It wasn't until the 1530s that Spanish explorers made it all the way to Peru, where they found a white-fleshed tuber that the locals called papas. And once those worked their way up to England in the 1590s, things got a little confused. What we call just plain potatoes were "Virginia potatoes" (or "bastard potatoes") at first, but as they became more and more common in the British Isles (like, for instance, in Ireland), people dropped the "Virginia," leaving us with just one word for two very different foods: "potato." Which meant that for most of the 17th century, it's impossible to tell which potato people were talking about.

Eventually, since the English climate was much more disposed to the white than the sweet, we settled on calling the sweet potatoes "sweet potatoes," but it's interesting to see how different Europeans dealt with the same problem. The French kept things very separate, with pomme de terre for the white ones and patate douce for the sweet, the Italians ended up calling sweet potatoes patata americana (in the inverse of older English), and the Germans came up with the same solution as us, with Kartoffel and Susskartoffel. Only the Spanish, the initial point of contact with both of these tubers, stuck to the original papa and patate divide.

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