Where did America’s great mashing Potato go?
Much is made of the rose potato, a red well shaped heirloom potato popular since the mid-19th century. But it had a great rival in the hearts of farmers and consumers in North American from 1810 to 1930. This rival had purple tinged skin with a blue nose, yellow-white flesh, and a multitude of names: Meschannock, Nephannocks, Nishenock, Chenango, Philadelphia, Blue Nose, and its most common, Mercer. It was created/discovered by John Gilky on the bank of Neshannock Creak, near the Chenango, at Newcastle, Pennsylvania in 1811. A description: “Tubers rather long and flat in shape, with numerous eyes; skin white, tinged with pale purple on the tip end, from which circumstance it has been called by some the Blue Nose. When cut in two a circle of the same color as the tip end is discovered around the center.” (Genesee Farmer, 1831, p. 148).
William Woys Weaver, the great plant and foodways historian, has recovered something of John Gilky’s background. He was an Irish immigrant. “Gilky created several subvarieties, including the Red Mercer (also known as Donaneil’s Beauty, Mormon, and Olympia) and the Black Mercer, a smooth purple-skinned spring potato with white flesh. This triumvirate of Mercers was profoundly important to the development of later nineteenth-century varieties because the Mercers were viewed as models by which other varieties should be judged.” [“Heirloom Potato Varieties,” Mother Earth News (March 14, 2013).]
The great selling point of this old potato was flavor. It was, for almost a century, the favorite mashing potato. It was not as productive, disease resistant, or early as other potatoes introduced to the market in the 19th and 20th centuries. But its taste was memorable, so memorable that when it vanished from a region it was regretted. I first began thinking about the potato when I ran across a description of a harvest season feast in the black quarter of Kansas city in 1913: “There would be about a half a bushel of fried chicken from which the necks, backbones, and sings had been eliminated, done to a rich brown color: flanked with mashed potatoes on one side (old blue Meshannock) as white as the driven snow and as light and pleasing as the laugh of a child: beaten biscuits, jams, preserves, and that old-fashioned apple butter corn dodger about the size of your clenched fist.” (Charleston Evening Post, November 20, 1913), 12.
It vanished from the United States because of its disease vulnerabilities. It vanished from the United States because of its disease vulnerabilities. In 1841 a waterborne fungus Phytophthora infestans was dumped onto Pennsylvania fields in a truckload of guano shipped from Peru. The Potato blight spread across north American and then across the Atlantic. The Mercer potato was vulnerable to the disease. Furthermore it did not perform well on clay soil. It was a sand potato. These field liabilities began to turn farmers away from the Mercer, despite its taste, in favor of agronomic potatoes in the 1860s-1870s.
Ther Mercer Potato not in the USDA’s germ plasm collection. It is not in the catalogs of U.S. heirloom seed companies. But there is happy news regarding this old revered variety. It does survive—in Canada--in Nova Scotia and Cape Breton. The cold climate their mitigates the disease pressure. Indeed, under one of its old American names, the Blue Nose. Indeed a slang term for a Nova Scotian is a blue noser.
Meet 19th century America’s favorite mashing potato—the Mercer/Meshannock or in this instance, the Cape Breton Blue Nose. Photo courtesy of Michael Smith: blue nose/Mercer.