ISSUE 28, POTATOES, Part 2: White Kidney
The White Kidney Potato [Foxite Potato]
In the beginning there were three market potatoes in the United States, three varieties for which seed and slips were widely sold: the Mercer (Chenango), the Pink Bud, and the Kidney (Foxite) Potato. The ad columns of American newspapers from the 1820s through the 1850s praised this trio above all others, regardless of region.
Some months ago I gave the history of the Mercer, indicating that while extinct in the United States, it survives in Nova Scotia as the cherished blue nose potato.
The Pink Bud potato would be developed by J. K. Bliss into the early Rose potato, progenitor of many of the red potatoes.
The cream white kidney potato, a long, slightly curved buttery tasting mashing potato, stood foremost in culinary fame during the first half of the 19th century. The technical term used to describe its character was “farinacious” meaning floury and bread-like. The common British prejudice that the kidney potato stood foremost in quality is featured in the climax of a humorous poem of 1823, “The York Kidney Potato,” in which Giles, a country bumpkin, gets into an argument with coffee house naturalists in London:
“What common ‘tatoes! Giles rejoin’d,
His fiest upon the table dashing,
“Take my advice—don’t purchase one
“Not even at a groat a ton,
None but York Kidney does for mashing.”
[The Atheneum; or, Spirit of the English Magazines, June 1, 1823, 183]
The English origins of the potato is suggested in the earliest print records. The first advertisements for the variety indicate that seed for the potato came from England. There were two forms of the potato: the “early white dwarf kidney” first noted in the New York Commercial Advertiser in March 31, 1809 and the late seasoned Ash leafed kidney potatoes. They were cultivated in the 18th century and comments in the early agricultural press indicated that it was a long-grown familiar variety: “An opinion has long prevailed with our Farmers that Kidney potatoes to not yield as much as other kinds,” wrote an advocate in the January 4 1828 issue of The New England Farmer (p. 193). The author proved it to be a massive cropper.
The alternative name for the white kidney, the Foxite Potato, also confesses English origin. The Foxites were in the early 19th century followers of the populist English Whig ideals of Charles James Fox. It was the English political position that ‘tasted best’ to many early American citizens, particularly the Pennsylvania horticulturists who improved the strain of the White Kidney Potato and distinguished their version by the name Foxite until the 1860s. The Kidney Potato was called the Foxite in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, and sometimes Virginia. Kidney Potato prevailed as the name in New York and New England.
Over the course of the 19th century the early season version of the potato prevailed over the late season which became functionally extinct by 1880. After 1850 the Kidney Potato enjoyed a new favor because its waxy/floury texture was deemed ideal for potato salad. The history of potato salad in America has yet to be fully written. It did not exist in any documentable measure prior to the mid-1830s when newspaper stories about French and German consumption of potato salad began appearing in American papers as novelties. Englishman Sydney Smith’s widely republish epigram-recipe for salad dressing included two pureed boiled potatoes—it was ubiquitous in the late 1830s. The dish itself probably first appeared on American tables in the 1840s. An 1843 poem in the Southern Literary Messenger on How to cook potatoes—fails to mention potato salad, while praising mashing over every other kind of cooked preparation
The Kidney Potato was supplanted in the United States by the hyper-productive while floury potatoes bred by J. K. Bliss in the decades after the Civil War. In Great Britain, however, it survived as a beloved salad potato and exists in two forms, the more popular of which is named the International Kidney Potato.