October 27th is National Potato Day.

“Potatoes. Po-ta-toes. Mash em, boil ‘em, stick ‘em in a stew.”

In a holiday that I’m sure Samwise Gamgee and the other hobbits, as well as much of the Earth’s population, would enjoy, today we celebrate the tubular, starchy crop who may look like a unappetizing, dull brown lump, but is so much more.

Potatoes–long heralded as one of the greatest foods of this Earth–have found a niche in humanity’s heart. We love our potatoes; along with the Sam’s instructive explanations above of indeed mashing them, boiling them, and sticking them into our stews and soups, we also fry them, slice them, dice them, load them with cream, cover them in cheese, scallop them, bake them to a crisp.

While potatoes were grown by the native civilizations for centuries in the Americas, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue and sparked the Columbian Exchange, the potato, along with other products like coffee and chewing gum (read about them in our previous In Honor Of’s!), made its way to the “Old World” and the many citizens who had never tasted it before in their life.

And, to be honest, they didn’t know what to do with it at first. Sir Walter Raleigh came back from the New World to England and Queen Elizabeth I, proudly boasting of his miraculous new crop that, when cooked properly, was delicious and very inexpensive to make. The queen agreed to give a shot, and ordered a feast of ONLY potato-based recipes. However, the cooks did not know to not cook the potato’s poisonous leaves, and upon serving them, the whole court got violent food poisoning. The Queen promptly banned potatoes from the court.

However, Europeans eventually learned how to grow and cook the vegetables, and boy did the grow and cook them. For the rising empires and monarchs, a plant that not only seemed to have enough good things inside it to keep a person full and healthy, as well as being a crop that didn’t require perfect conditions (it is a root, afterall) or fertilizer for growth, was the perfect food to fuel a growing population. Historians have said that the introduction of potatoes ended the chance of food famine in northern Europe.

(Of course, when that one food that ends famine gets destroyed by another disease, then it will do quite the opposite of ending famines, as the Irish have so unfortunately figured out.)

Fast forward a couple hundred years and Thomas Jefferson introduced the White House to french fries (called les frites), Marie Antoinette wore a potato spud flower in her hair, and today it seems that our affinity for potatoes has only increased–not only are potatoes our #5 crop, the US has state nicknamed “the Potato State” (you gotta love Idaho).

We couldn’t sing praises of this starchy vegetable louder if we tried: we have come to point that we have a national day for it, and that we have potato-based recipes for every meal of the day! Here are crispy hashbrowns for breakfast, homemade fries for lunch, and twice-baked potatoes or gnocchi (potato pasta) for dinner.

Happy National Potato Day everybody!