The very first recipe in my battered up old Julia Child cookbook (Mastering the Art of French Cooking) is potage Parmentier, a leek and potato soup, served hot, which I guess is what makes it not vichyssoise. I’ve been making it for years, because for some reason, it tastes so much better than the sum of its parts (potatoes, leeks, butter, milk). But I never knew who or what parmentier was. Now I do, having read How Carrots Won the Trojan War: Curious (but True) Stories of Common Vegetables, by Rebecca Rupp.

Antoine-Augustin Parmentier (1737-1813) was an early promoter of the potato in France, at a time when potatoes were looked on with deep suspicion. Potatoes had been slow to take hold in Europe in the seventeenth century, and outside of Ireland, were used primarily as hog food. But after a series of crop failures and famines, the Prussian Emperor Frederick the Great, determined to get Prussian peasants to grow them, distributed free potato seeds to all the farmers in his realm. Faced with their continued recalcitrance, the Emperor announced that farmers that didn’t grow potatoes would have their nose and ears cut off. That seemed to work. (252).

So during the Seven Years War, Parmentier, a young French soldier, was thrown into a Prussian prison, where he ate a whole lot of potatoes and emerged from prison a big champion of this versatile tuber. He then spent the next few decades promoting his favorite vegetable to his fellow Frenchmen. It took awhile to gain acceptance in France. According to Rupp, one problem was that Parmentier got started on the wrong track by promoting potato starch as a great substitute for wheat flour. (It’s not a great substitute.) To his dismay, instead of cooking with it, French aristocrats enthusiastically adopted potato starch as a great way to whiten their towering wigs. (253)

Parmentier finally got his lucky break when, on Louis XVI’s thirty-fifth birthday (August 23, 1785), Parmentier presented the king with a bouquet of potato flowers. The king tucked one in his lapel, and his wife, Marie Antoinette, stuck a flower into her hair. Suddenly potatoes became all the rage at court, and Parmentier oversaw a series of all-potato banquets. By the end of the century, the potato was a firmly established and popular part of French cuisine.