Many Germans will be happy to point out that Germany is also a land of the potato – without giving any due credit to Poland, Ireland or the Americas. There's some truth to this, almost every dish comes with potatoes.
Even if the country acts as if it invented zee tater, it took 300 years before Germans embraced them.
Its yield from a small plot could feed a family for a year. They are easy to grow and store, and you can do boil them, fry them, mash them, stuff them, or distill them into – a drink worthy of high school bush bashes.
Despite these advantages, grumpy German farmers – especially the Prussians, who were possibly the grumpiest of all Germans – refused to plant them.
When Frederick the Great became king of Prussia, he wanted to modernize farming to avoid food shortages. This meant potato farming.
Frederick is mostly fondly remembered for doubling the size of Prussia in conquest – yes, there was a time when German conquerors were fondly remembered – but he also composed music, played the flute, was a big fan of J.S. Bach, was Voltaire's pen pal, and did not live extravagantly.
In our modern, simplistic people-labelling system, Frederick the Great was an Age of Enlightenment Hipster.
His abililty to understand and see trends (he liked Bach before he he was big), made him aware of how much trendsetting power he had. So, he planted potatoes in his garden at Sanssouci Palace outside of Berlin.
Farmers in his kingdom heard the Hipster King was planting potatoes, and quickly followed his example. Like artisanal organic craft beer today, potatoes were soon everywhere in Prussia.
Prussia became the largest part of Germany and today Frederick is remembered by some for bringing the potato to Germany, and not a conqueror.
Thinking about calling bullshit? At Sanssouci, Frederick's modest palace at Potsdam, people pay tribute to his feat of tater-ness by laying potatoes on his equally modest headstone.
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| Potatoes laid in respect for the Tater King, Frederick the Great. |
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