Essex County herald. [volume] (Guildhall, Vt.) 1873-1964, 1886-01-15
served the governor in a conversation
recently.
The Potato.

No article of common food has been
more abused than the humble potato.
Yet no other vegetable is capable of
being put to so many uses. IL is the
rival of bread, and shares with it the
honor Of always being found in its place
ON cur tables. Everybody, except some
dyspeptics, can eat potatoes, but it is
not every on3 who knows the best way
of eating them or Of cooking them.
A baked potato is always nutritious.
Boiled potatoes are scarcely worth their
salt if they are left to soak in the kettle.
Mashed potatoes are good if served with
milk, pepper and salt.
Fried potatoes, sliced and fried in fat
or butter, are palatable, but much harder
to digest than baked ones. The popular
Saratoga chips do not retain the dis
tinctive po'ato flavor, and have lost most
of its nutriment
The Ayst easy and effcctuGl way to
secure the genuine flavor of the potato
| is to cook it according to this rule:
Pare the potato and slice it up, but
not too thin; place the slices in large
pie-dish, as if you were to make an
apple pie; pour into the dish very little
water, drop few slices of butter upon
the potatoes, sprinkle them. with salt and
pepper, cover the whole with another
plate and set the dish in hot oven.
Twenty minutes time is sufficient for the
baking. The writer has tried this rule
and always with success. The potatoes
have distinctive flavor to be gained by
no other method of cooking.
The history of the potato exhibits the
strength of prejudice and the ease with
which a trihing circumstance will often
remove it. The introduction of the po.
tato into the gardens and on to the
tables Of the people of Europe encoun-.
tered for more than two centuries, such
opposition that the philosophers of the
age were powerlcs3 to persuade the peo'
pie to use the tuber.
Louis XIV. of France one day wore u
bunch of potato flowers at a court festi.
val. Then the people obsequiously ac-
knowledged that the potato might be
useful, and in few years its cultivation
as an article of fool became universal.
The potatoes stalk produces in Austria
cottony flax. In Sweden sugar is eX-
ira ted from its roots. BY combustion
it yields quantity of potash. Its
apples, when ripe, ferment and yield
vinegar by exposure, or spirit by distil-
lation. It's tubercles made into pulp
re used as substitute for soap in
bleaching. By different manipulations
it is made to furnish two kinds of flour,
a cruel, and cellular pith which in
times of scarcity may be made into
bread or applied to increase the bulk
of bread made from grain. It's starch is
little, if at all, inferior to the Indian
arrow Wroot.
The potato is a native of South Amer
lea; but the cultivated pant yields a
product infinitely superior in quantity
and quality to its wild brother. One of
the sentences in Dakota orators speech
eulogized the potato. He said:
every often an entire family in Da-
kota sits upon one end of a potato
while the other end is roasting in the
fire"
Louis XIV. would have been proud Oh
his potato blossom bouquet could he
have foreseen such a growth of the
potato as this Dakota variety Youths
Companion.