I headed to the Union Square farmers market. From Halal Pastures and Norwich Meadows Farm, I collected eight varieties, ranging from thumb-size La Rattes to a breed developed by Stone Barns’ Dan Barber and Cornell University plant breeder and geneticist Walter De Jong called Upstate Abundance. Visiting from Spain, I didn’t have a kitchen of my own in which to conduct a taste test. But my mother’s house in Hudson features a well-appointed one. I sent out a flurry of invitations, piled 60 pounds of potatoes, labeled and separated by type, into a Rimowa suitcase that fit them so neatly it seemed purpose-made, and headed upstate.
I decided to prepare my eight varieties by simply boiling them in potently salted water. I allowed two sauces—aioli and salsa verde—with the stipulation that they only be provided once the potatoes had been tasted unadorned. My tasters—a farm manager, a five-year-old and a nine-year-old, a Chilean artist, an energy executive, a filmmaker, a personal trainer, and jewelry designer Presley Oldham—arrived just after 5 p.m. I poured La Spinetta rosé and juggled pots to get eight batches of potatoes cooking simultaneously.
The first potato, a pretty pinto-spotted variety called Masquerade, was rated from 8 to 10 by everyone. Tasting notes described it as “smelling like chestnut,” “sweet! delicious!,” and “fatty and earthy.” The pink-fleshed Mountain Rose received universal reprobation (“less sweet,” “no flavor,” “flat,” “watery,”) but high marks for appearance (“3 for flavor, 7 for looks”). Upstate Abundance was “very potato-ey” and “starchy.” Red fingerling was “meh,” “slightly bitter and acidic,” “metallic,” and “gummy.” The greatest surprise came in the inky Purple Majesty, its flesh only a shade paler than its peel. It was rated 9 or 10 by everyone and described as “rich and deep,” tasting “exactly like artichoke,” and, by the Chilean artist, “like the Andean mountains themselves!”
I bid my tasters goodnight. I knew more about what a potato could be than I had before. But that night, I lay in bed, fixated on the Chilean artist’s mention of the Andes. The Purple Majesty wasn’t domesticated thousands of years ago in the high plateau, but bred in a Colorado State University research center in 2010. On the return flight to Spain, I drafted pathetic entreaties to my editor about the necessity of a Peruvian expedition. Only then, staring out the window, did I remember that 30,000 feet below me lay the Canary Islands, home to the second-highest potato biodiversity in the world, after South America. I devised a new plan.
Several days later, I boarded a three-hour flight to Tenerife, where I met Domingo Ríos Mesa at the offices of the Centro de Conservación de la Biodiversidad Agrícola de Tenerife (CCBAT). In the basement cold storage rooms, set to around 41 degrees, Ríos Mesa and his team store 110 ancient varieties of potato, some genetically similar to types dug up in the Americas more than 400 years ago. “About 15 ancient varieties are still grown regularly on the island,” he explained.
