Encyclopedia’s 11th edition puts spin on Irish spud

Some 20 years ago I was sitting in a research seminar on English literature when the faculty member in charge began sermonizing on the virtues of the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. When it appeared in 1911, this particular edition was noteworthy for its lengthy entries filled with obscure historical detail and for the attention it paid to classical knowledge and the arts.

In a reverent tone, the professor suggested that anyone who happened to run across a set of the 11th edition at a garage sale should pounce like a war hero on a live hand grenade.

As it happens, the mystique of the 11th edition is legendary. When the Baker University library liquidated its musty stacks a few years ago, an e-mail went out to the faculty announcing the availability of a couple of sets of the 11th edition, free for the taking. A mini-stampede ensued. Although I wasn’t the first through the door, I did manage to cobble together a mismatched set minus a couple of volumes.

As with any reference work, the 11th edition provides a snapshot of what passed for necessary information at the moment of copyright, as filtered through the mindset of the encyclopaedia’s editors. These were not regular folk but the great and mighty intellects of their time. They clearly divided the world into two sectors — civilization, as represented by Western Europe and cultured North America, and everyone else, a catch-all category for heathens and others of lesser breeding and geographical misfortune.

Obviously, much of the information that counted as true in 1911 has been disproved or debunked, and some of it is downright bizarre. The entry on music, for example, states unequivocally that there is no such thing as music outside of Western culture. This, of course, is interesting news to anyone in a non-Western culture who listens to music.

Occasionally I amuse myself by thumbing through the dog-eared pages, filled with decades of students’ margin scribbles. Interestingly, the 11th edition has been a useful source of information on the history of food, particularly when I have questions about how we have come to think about certain foods and who gets to claim them as part of their culture. While I often question what I read there, the 11th edition has been very revealing about how food traditions have developed and changed over time.

With St. Patrick’s Day coming next week, I got to thinking about the history of the Irish potato. Although the Irish claimed the spud for several centuries prior to the famines of the 1840s, which sent immigrants scurrying for North America, the potato is native to South America. This unassuming tuber has been involved in more than its share of transatlantic travel, and I was curious to see how the 11th edition would spin that chapter of history.

As I suspected, the 11th edition goes on at great length about the potato; what I didn’t expect was the slant on its history. In a rather unabashed display of anti-Irish sentiment, the 11th edition describes the white variety simply as the English potato.

The only Irish reference occurs in connection with potatoes brought in the 1580s by colonists returning from what later was designated as North Carolina. These colonists had been dispatched by Sir Walter Raleigh, and the first English potatoes reportedly were cultivated on his estate near Cork, although any explicit reference to its location in Ireland is missing.

The article mentions that potatoes already had appeared elsewhere in Europe and that the papacy even was involved in the dissemination of the potato in southern Europe. What is clear, however, is that once potatoes reached Northern Europe, they were English. Period.

The Irish are never written into the 11th edition’s history of the potato: No mention of the Irish famines, no mention of the cultural attachment of the Irish to the potato. The Peruvians are named as the original source of both the white and sweet potato, but the cultural question of greatest concern to the editors of 11th edition is whether — it is to the Spaniards that we owe this valuable esculent — or whether the English colonists get the credit. In any case, the Irish get none.

But the august editors of the 11th edition didn’t have the last word. In potato politics, the Irish have the upper hand — at least for the time being — and their story has been written back into the pages of spud history. That will be clear on Monday, when we boil a few potatoes with our corned beef and cabbage.