How to make perfect roast potatoes and many other recipes to have fun with this versatile and always good ingredient
What is hot or cold? potatoes they always find a place in our table: both with dishes without season, such as fried potatoes or roast potatoes, and in soup version, to warm up when winter comes. In short, we eat potatoes all year round.
Do potatoes contain vitamins?
Compared to the average of vegetables and other vegetables, they are more caloric because they contain a lot of starch (but have fewer calories than bread and pasta). At the same time, however, they are rich in potassium and vitamins of group B (B1, B2, B6) and C. Basso is, instead, the protein content.
History
Now think of the three great fathers of Italian literature: Dante, Petrarca and Boccaccio. Think of the great masters of painting like Cimabue and Giotto. Here, they never ate potatoes (or even tomatoes, of course). As we all know, only after 1492, the year of the discovery of America with Christopher Columbus, do potatoes reach the Old Continent. But the list of illustrious names made above should be much longer, because the European population was very wary of this tuber.
In Italy the potatoes arrived in the second half of the sixteenth century thanks to the Discalced Carmelite fathers, who also explained how they were to be cultivated and consumed.
But we have to wait almost the end of the eighteenth century for potatoes to spread and really become a common food. It is all due to the French agronomist Parmentier Antoine-Augustin who during the Seven Years' War (1756-1763) finds himself a prisoner in Germany, a country where potatoes are spread as food among Prussian soldiers. In addition to appreciating the taste, Parmentier notes its ease of growth in relatively poor soils. So, back home, in years of terrible famine, he proposes them as food to fight hunger. We are now in 1785 when Louis XVI, precisely because of the famine, orders the nobles to force their farmers to cultivate the potato. But distrust, as we know, is difficult to combat, and therefore not much was achieved. Thus we arrive at the well-known stratagem devised by Parmentier himself. This is what happened: we started with the cultivation of potatoes at the Campo di Marte, in a land watched by the royal soldiers, and then spread the word that there was produced a precious plant reserved only for the king. Greed did the rest: many turned into petty thieves even if they took possession of the forbidden fruit. Thus it was that a few years later, in 1789, in the middle of the French Revolution, the potato had already become a popular food.
Returning to Italy, in the middle of the nineteenth century the potato, although it had already arrived for almost three centuries with the Discalced Carmelites, still found much resistance, as evidenced by its scarce presence in the cookbooks of the time. In short, it still took some time for it to become one of our most common, most loved, most consumed foods.
Our recipes with potatoes
Because of its great versatility, potatoes are now among the vegetables with the most variety of preparations. Here are some of ours.
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