From Portuguese to Plates: The Potato Voyage

 

Indian cuisine is rife with innovative fares of the potato. Innumerable dishes are rich with this starchy goodness, and today its prevalence in India slashes across class, caste and religious boundaries. To the modern Indian, not finding the soft potato filling in the masala dosa will be oddly confounding, as will discovering that the samosa they ordered in a restaurant came stuffed with mincemeat and aubergine, instead of the customary spicy potato.

But this was exactly the picture about 500 years ago. The samosa, for example, is elaborately described in a 15th-century text called the Nimatnama, the Book of Delights, patronised by Sultan Ghiyas al-Din Khilji, ruler of Malwa in the late 13th century. Out of the eight recipes chronicled about the royal relish, none include the indispensable potato.

In fact, it was only in the 17th century that the potato was introduced to the subcontinent, indubitably linked with the trade routes developed by the memorable Vasco da Gama. As fleets of Portuguese trader ships made their way to India in search of fabled, treasured spices, the potato made its way too. Native to South America, it is thought to have grown wild in regions between south of present-day Peru, and was introduced to Europe by Spanish conquistadors in 1570.

But this ubiquitous vegetable’s consumption was restricted to a few pockets, like Surat and Karnataka in 1675. Its cultivation and subsequent habituation in diverse Indian cuisines only happened with the coming of the British in the 18th century, as colonial powers spiked its cultivation for a variety of reasons. Farmers in the Bengal presidency, for example, were incentivized with monetary rewards, even forced, to grow the tuber.

The potato’s story intricately connects several continents in divergent contexts. The samosa on your plate may singularly encompass colonialism, maritime travel, and culture dynamics, along with the starchy, delicious flavour.