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Comment by dghughes | Hacker News Reader

I find it amazing that Ireland would be eating a plant from the west coast of an isolated mountainous region of South America less than 100 years after Europeans went there. Even things like oranges and bananas were rare in the late 1800s early 1900s in the US and Canada.

It's amazing how much of food from the Americas mostly central and southern is normal everyday food. What would we all be eating if the Americas went undiscovered until recently?

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Ireland specifically switched to potatoes as a part of the tenant farming system the British instituted on the Island and its desire throughout Europe combined with the necessity to grow enough food to feed themselves off the product.

Pre-Colombian exchanges, Ireland mostly ate oats/grains, a small variety of veggies and fruits, dairy goods (cheese and milk), meats (cattle and sheep) and a lot of fish. You can still see a bit of this variety in certain areas like Howth in Dublin and the less touched western towns.

My ancestors left Ireland only to arrive in Canada to the same system of absentee landlords i.e. the British who took nearly everything from tenants, the farmers.

Yep, the potato was favoured for the ability to grow enough food to feed your family on the shitty scraps of ground your absentee landlords "allowed" you to keep.

In a similar vein, the potato revolutionised Māori inter-tribal warfare when introduced to Aotearoa New Zealand (possibly more so than the musket), as you could grow far more calories from the same soil with potatoes than the traditional kūmara/sweet potato - and they kept far better than kūmara while on the move.

This allowed for longer campaigning against opposing tribes, which led to widespread mass migrations to escape enemy tribes - hence why the area now occupied by Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau, our largest city, was mostly depopulated when Europeans started settling it.

And of course, those mass migrations led to more conflicts.

Yeah, as a rule of thumb potato and rice can feed twice as many people compared to wheat or other crops. Europe had neither so the potato was an instant hit since the alternative was to starve.

The other factor is that potatoes can be concealed easily, so when armies swept through to seize food, you’d keep your potatoes and not starve.

But you said you slipped and fell on it...

Well, a staple food of the native people of New Zealand was a sweet potato originating from South America, they brought it with them in the 13th century when settling NZ from 'Hawaiki', their ancestral homeland that is thought to be either the Cook or Society Islands.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e4/Chronolo...

This comes up surprisingly often on HN, but there isn't really anything surprising about it. The whole reason Europeans went to the Americas was to bring back things to be sold in European markets. They might have been a bit disappointed when potatoes turned out to be so easy to grow in European climates that there was no money to be made by importing them, though.

> bananas were rare in the late 1800s early 1900

My father in law born in Norway in 1950s can remember getting excited because the store had these bananas he'd heard about. He ate his first one with the skin and didn't think they were so great.

British children in the 1940s were familiar enough with bananas that they missed them during WW2 [1]. Import was banned during the war because the refrigerated ships were needed elsewhere (and the voyage was risky), but resumed in the early 1950s (?). They were widely imported from the 1880s up until WW2 [2], but I'm not sure how often the typical person would eat one.

(And I don't know how much of this British Empire trade would have spread to Ireland.)

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/03/a2734...

[2] https://cadmus.eui.eu/bitstream/handle/1814/11486/RSCAS_2009...

A signature plant for south of Russia/Ukraine, an eastern europe speciality, is also a new world plant: Sunflower.

And there are lots of foods to discover still in the mountains of tropical areas

Bread and pasta, perhaps?

Though that pasta would be pretty bland without any tomato sauce!

Also weird to think that, as much as many people associate tomatoes with Italy, they were also brought from the Americas.

> Though that pasta would be pretty bland without any tomato sauce!

You'd use onions and garlic. Those are both still massively popular today.

Cheese, garlic, and oil are all staples for flavoring pasta, and none of them rely on a new world crop.

And cheese and garlic are used with bread too.

All good thoughts. I think Italy has the soil and weather for goood tomatoes though, so it took off. That said, I think most sauces in Italy are not tomato based. Simple things like Oil and salt is pretty common on pasta (and VERY tasty if u ask me). But to the point, yeah, bread, pasta, and olive oil…

> Though that pasta would be pretty bland without any tomato sauce!

Fettuccine alfredo.

> Created by Alfredo di Lelio I (1882–1959)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fettuccine_Alfredo

Many things we assume Italians ate forever are relatively new: Brocollini, Tiramisu, Ciabatta were all created in the 20th century.

A lot of HN (myself included) is older than ciabatta (1982!)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciabatta

From your link: "Serving fettuccine with butter and cheese was first mentioned in a 15th-century recipe"

Carbonara, though. Pasta, eggs, bacon, cheese and pepper. Pigs, cows and wheat came with the first farmers, some 6k years ago. Chicken around 2k years ago, but they could have used other eggs. Pepper much later, silk road trade. I imagine they could have had something like carbonara a long time ago.

Guanciale.

https://cookandeatbetter.wordpress.com/2010/05/06/recipe-box...

Here you'll find non-tomato condimento --

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Sauces_Shapes_Pasta_the...

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