By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
Some folks might be annoyed or confused to find 20 lbs. of potatoes piled on their desk. I was delighted, and ate every single one of them.
It was March 1985, and I was in law school at the University of Utah College of Law. The potatoes were a “gift” from my classmates, their friendly way of celebrating (and teasing me about) St. Patrick’s Day.
I was a 25-year-old starving law student. Well, not really starving, but everything I owned fit into my car, which half the time did not start. The potatoes arrived at an opportune time. I cooked them in various ways for lunch and dinner, and they fed me for almost two weeks.
It was only one chapter in what has been a lifetime relationship with potatoes. Would you expect anything else from an Irish-Catholic family? Some might attribute it to what is commonly called the Potato Famine. Also known as the Great Hunger, the Famine was an unfortunate fact of life in Ireland from about 1845 to 1852.
Wikipedia describes the potato as “a starch tuber of the plant Solanum tuberosum” and says it is “a root vegetable native to the Americas, with the plant itself being a perennial in the nightshade family Solanaceae.” How did it get to Ireland? In 1536 Spanish Conquistadors conquered Peru, discovered the potato, and brought the edible plant back to Europe. Sir Walter Raleigh introduced potatoes to Ireland in 1589 on 40,000 acres of land near Cork.
The cheap, convenient, and hearty potato soon was a staple in the diet of Irish tenant farmers. This made my ancestors especially vulnerable in 1845 when, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “a strain of the water mold Phytophthora infestans, which causes late blight in potatoes, arrived in Ireland accidentally from North America.”
My preliminary research indicates that at least five of my ancestral grandparents likely left Ireland and came to America to escape the Great Hunger the blight caused. They arrived in New England or Canada between the years 1845 and 1850, ages 11, 14, 15, 20, and 30.
They came primarily from Western Ireland, including Limerick, County Cork, and County Clare. Their last names were McCarthy, Fitzgerald, Gleason, and Flaherty. My O’Brien grandfather also emigrated—but from England to America—during the deadly famine years.
I suspect all these relatives ate potatoes too, because their direct descendants—my parents—served them to us several times a week. Primarily, we ate them mashed, baked, and scalloped. It was unusual to sit down to a meal without potatoes.
I doubt that my own parents’ potato-eating ways were an aberration. One of my O’Brien uncles has joked how his family was so poor that they ate the insides of their potatoes on Monday, and the outsides on Tuesday. Several of my O’Brien cousins have a cherished family tradition of making and eating hand-cut French fries whenever they get together. I salivate when I see the photos on Facebook.
I’ve always preferred fried potatoes and potato chips to other recipes, and often recreate the fry sauce recipe my older sister Moe taught me when I was a boy. Several dietitians have warned that these are the two LEAST healthy ways to eat my beloved heritage food, so sometimes we bake sliced potatoes with a light sprinkling of olive oil and garlic salt instead of frying them. Air fryers help too.
I am proud that my potato passion lives on in my three adult children, even if some of them have branched out to sweet potatoes too. They used to ask why we eat so many potatoes. There are a variety of answers.
The best answer may be that potatoes just taste so darn good.
Speaking of taste, another answer involves the irreverent Stanford University band. At halftime during one Notre Dame vs. Stanford football game, the Cardinal band presented a “show” featuring “Seamus O’Hungry” and the famine. It was poor taste. ND lost the game, but the band was widely criticized and banned from future ND games. Sometimes I eat potatoes to relish such just deserts.
In lighter moments, I’ve also told our children that we eat potatoes because it’s a DNA thing, and a wise hedge against future Potato Famines. Yet, the Great Hunger really is nothing to joke about.
The mid-century blight hit crop after crop in field after field, wiping out much of the main source of nourishment for many poor Irish Catholics. In the Irish Diaspora, a million sons and daughters of Erin died of starvation, and another 2 million left the country, including my own grandparents. The steady passage of time probably has rendered it somewhat difficult to comprehend fully the horrible nature of this natural disaster.
Descriptions like this one (from Timothy Egan’s 2016 The Immortal Irishman), however, make it much more vivid: “Through the winter of 1846 and into the spring, hundreds, then thousands of people dropped dead of starvation. Bellies of little children swelled, their faces went powdery, their hair fell out by the handful, and they sniffled away to a corner of a hut or a roadside ditch, their parents soon to follow. Others were sickened by scurvy, their gums swollen and bleeding, skin blue-splotched. They had subsisted, for a time, on nettles, blackberries and raw cabbage, none of which could be foraged during the cold months. A doctor in Skibbereen found seven people under a single blanket, unable to move; one had been dead for hours. Coffins were reused after hasty ceremonies, the bottoms cut out, the deceased dropped onto the ground.”
We Irish-Americans eat potatoes for many reasons. Almost instinctively, I understand that one reason must be to remember—in a small and simple way—those who could not eat them, and those who were able to escape so we can.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings (found here), about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, was published by Paraclete Press (more information here) in August 2021.
