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The Propitious Esculent: The Potato in World History is a book by John Reader outlining the role of the potato (the esculent of the title) in world history. [1] [2] It was also published under the titles The Untold History of the Potato and Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent.
Potatoes comprised about 10% of the caloric intake of Europeans. Along with several other foods that either originated in the Americas or were successfully grown or harvested there, potatoes sustained European populations. [47] The potato promoted economic development in Britain by underpinning the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century. It ...
Modern carrots were described at about this time by the English antiquary John Aubrey (1626–1697): "Carrots were first sown at Beckington in Somersetshire. Some very old Man there [in 1668] did remember their first bringing hither." [32] European settlers introduced the carrot to colonial America in the 17th century. [33]
[5] Pliny the Elder writes extensively about agriculture from books XII to XIX; in fact, XVIII is The Natural History of Grain. [6] Crops grown on Roman farms included wheat, barley, millet, pea, broad bean, lentil, flax, sesame, chickpea, hemp, turnip, olives, pear, apples, figs, and plums. Others in the Mediterranean include:
The first European record of the potato is as late as 1537, by the Spanish conquistador Juan de Castellanos, and it spread quite slowly throughout Europe from thereon. So the original legend likely refers to what the Dutch call a 'sweet potato' or pastinaak which is a parsnip ; this vegetable played a similar role in Dutch cuisine prior to the ...
Root vegetables such as turnips, beets, parsnips, carrots, black radish and potatoes historically made up a large portion of the Ashkenazi diet in Europe. The potato – indigenous to the Americas – had an enormous impact on Ashkenazi cuisine, though it reached most Ashkenazi Jews only in the second half of the 19th century. [11]
Potatoes eventually became an important staple food in the diets of many Europeans, contributing to an estimated 12 to 25% of the population growth in Afro-Eurasia between 1700 and 1900. [12] The introduction of the potato to the Old World accounts for 47 percent of the increase in urbanization between 1700 and 1900. [13]
The European potato failure was a food crisis caused by potato blight that struck Northern and Western Europe in the mid-1840s. The time is also known as the Hungry Forties . While the crisis produced excess mortality and suffering across the affected areas, particularly affected were the Scottish Highlands , with the Highland Potato Famine and ...