Mash hits: the land that spawned the supermarket spud

Most potatoes can be traced to a single Chilean island

By Mark Johanson

Off the coast of northern Patagonia, some 1,220km south of the capital of Chile, lies an island shaped like a peanut. The patchwork farms and wood-shingled churches of Chiloé lie below moody skies that often unleash horizontal raindrops amid howling winds. Get enough drizzle in your eyes to blur out the volcanoes in the distance, and you’d swear the radiant green hills belonged not in South America, but half a world away in Ireland. And just like Ireland, the staple crop on Chiloé is the potato.

The potatoes of Chiloé are nothing like the Maris Pipers, Russets and other familiar white-fleshed varieties that most of us eat. Chiloé’s 286 varieties of native potato come in an array of vibrant colours and unfamiliar shapes, with crumpled bodies, bulbous nodes and blotchy insides resembling tie-dye shirts. It’s as though the potato has dressed up for the circus.

“Each one has a different function and flavour,” says María Isabel Paillán, who grows native potatoes on a community farm in Chiloé. She places several varieties on a wooden table in her rough-hewn home and points to a clavela lisa. This is her favourite, she says: its pink skin and creamy white flesh is perfect for making chochoca, an unleavened potato bread that’s cooked on a giant rolling pin over an open fire. She shows me purple varieties, including the finger-like michuñe negra, which taste a bit like an artichoke, and the slightly sweet purple-speckled viscocha, which she uses to make earthy crisps.

The potato is now integral to diets from Idaho to Irkutsk, yet it’s a relatively recent addition to most cuisines around the world. Scientists reckon that potatoes originated in the Peruvian Andes. It was probably from here that the first ones were ferried back to Europe in the 16th century by Spanish conquistadores.

Europeans at first treated potatoes as a botanical curiosity, and mostly used them to feed livestock. Over time, however, they became a staple in many countries. But the Peruvian strains of potatoes were used to a consistent 12 hours of equatorial sunlight – they’re now known as “short-day potatoes” – and fared poorly in the longer but weaker summer sun of higher latitudes in Europe. Nevertheless, Europeans became so hooked on spuds that when an epidemic of potato blight hit crops in the mid-19th century, it caused the “great famine” in Ireland and beyond.

After the famine, most farmers in Europe switched to the “long-day” species native to Chiloé. It is these Chilean varieties that, through decades of micro-evolution and selective breeding, developed into the common spuds we now see in our supermarkets. Most potatoes these days are grown in Europe and Asia: China, India and Russia are the three top producers. The citizens of Belarus, Ukraine and Latvia are the most voracious consumers, eating around 500g of potatoes a day each, or two large spuds. Yet more than 90% of modern potato varieties cultivated across the world today can be traced back to Chiloé.

The islanders of Chiloé are proud of the part their soil has played in the rise of this staple crop, and potatoes pervade every aspect of life. They are part of the island’s folk medicine. Some residents treat internal haemorrhages by bathing in the starchy water potatoes have been boiled in. Others put slices of raw tubers on the skin to ease headaches, fevers or burns.

Potatoes infuse Chiloé’s mythology of devious forest goblins, fish-herding mermaids and looming phantom ships. One legend holds that Lluhay, a mythical silver lizard who munches on potato flowers, brings good fortune to anyone able to capture him. Another tells of a worm called Coñipoñi, who, if found on a potato stalk, can be placed under the pillow of a newborn to protect it. Some people from Chiloé even carry a potato in their pocket like an amulet to ward off spells cast by spiteful neighbours.

Some 800 varieties of potato were once cultivated in Chiloé. Anita Behn curates a gene bank of potatoes at the Universidad Austral de Chile, which collects, preserves and cultivates rare varieties. Compared with the many-splendoured, colourful strains that the gene bank includes, the ancestors of the white-fleshed European and American varieties look rather boring. But Behn reckons that the neutral colour and versatile cooking capabilities of these plain spuds may have been a commercial advantage. We tend to favour white rice, white bread and yellow corn too, even though more garish strains are often tastier and healthier.

Many types of potato went out of cultivation over the centuries. During the 20th century a handful of white potatoes were reimported to Chiloé from Europe, larger and yielding more spuds a season than when they had left, and these strains came to dominate the island’s output. The more colourful native strains were considered poor man’s food and survived mostly due to the efforts of elderly rural women, who cultivated them in small family gardens as their mothers had done before them.

Aware that something was being lost, some Chileans started trying to preserve the country’s genetic heritage. In the 1960s an agronomist called Andrés Contreras launched a decades-long quest to find local potato gardens on Chiloé and document their contents. Chiloé is Chile’s second-largest island, and Contreras travelled its dusty tracks from one end to the other, as well as going to many of its tiny satellite islands, to gather samples. He later became the curator of the potato gene bank at the university. He also set up programmes in rural communities to farm disappearing native varieties and study their nutritional value. By the time he died in 2014 his work had helped to pull many varieties back from the brink of extinction.

In 2012 the United Nations recognised Chiloé’s efforts to preserve its agricultural heritage. More recently the island began reclaiming its culinary heritage too. Lorna Muñoz, a local chef, has collected recipes from island elders into a book and serves them at her restaurant, Travesía, in Castro, the island’s capital. Her aim, she says, is to “put this heritage in front of the younger generation so that it isn’t lost for ever.”

Travesía lies behind a dandelion-yellow façade in a wooden house built by Muñoz’s great-grandparents. Muñoz demonstrates the astounding versatility of native potatoes. “In our gastronomic culture, the potato is always present,” she says, grating yellow-fleshed lengua de vaca potatoes for a pancake called milcao that will accompany a multi-coloured casserole of layered native potatoes, seaweed and sheep’s cheese topped with grilled red octopus.

Muñoz also teases out the unique flavours of distinct native varieties of potato that can be used to make different breads with dough made from potato and flour, as well as stews and porridge. She even makes potato desserts: mella de papa is a cake-like dish made with potatoes that have remained in the soil from one harvest to the next, which concentrates their sugars. Muñoz uses the red-skinned michuñe rojo, which is already slightly sweet, and mixes it with flour, toasted hazelnut, vanilla and pisco brandy to form a batter which she then boils in the leaves of Chilean rhubarb and serves with ice cream made with local calafate berries.

The island is emerging as a culinary hotspot. Foodies from other parts of Chile and beyond come to sample the native potatoes with oysters, king crabs and piure (a type of marine invertebrate) fresh from the sea. More local restaurants now buy these colourful local strains, and increasingly supermarkets in the Chilean capital of Santiago are stocking them too. An artisanal Chilean crisp brand, Tika, includes native potatoes in the products it sells in eight countries.

Though the market for native varieties remains small, the scarcity of these strains is now working in their favour: in a reversal of fate, farmers on Chiloé often find that it’s more profitable to plant colourful tubers than the more common types. And Chiloé is hoping that its native strains may help to change the lot of farmers worldwide once again. Scientists at the gene bank in Chile are working on isolating genes in native Chilote potatoes that are resistant to disease, with a view to introducing them into commercial varieties. These colourful leftovers could one day prove as valuable as the spuds that got away.

Photographs PATRICE DE VILLIERS

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