Garnet Chili Potatoes, Vegetables of Interest Sonoma CA
Garnet Chili Potato
New York State
Sometime in 1841 a waterborne fungus Phytophthora infestans was dumped onto potato fields in the eastern United States in loads of guano fertilizer from Peru; something similar may have happened in Europe about the same time. It blighted potatoes in Pennsylvania, then New England. In some places crop failures were extensive. In Ireland, in 1845, they proved catastrophic, provoking the infamous “Potato Famine.” All of the favorite varieties of American potato—including the cherished Mercer—proved vulnerable to blight. Horticulturists did not understand the causes of the malady, and thought that some sort of “constitutional degeneracy” caused potatoes to rot. Rev. Chauncey E. Goodrich, chaplain of the New York Lunatic Asylum, reasoned that the only way to counter this degeneracy was to return to the homeland of the vegetable in South America, import primitive landraces filled with “original vitality” and rebuild the potato crop from improved versions of these importations. He surrendered his post to devote himself to the potato problem. As contemporary Rev. Henry Ward Beecher reported, “Mr. Goodrich, in 1843, at the expense of 200 dollars, procured some potatoes from Chile. From 1843 until the time of his death in 1863, he raised not less that 16,000 seedlings.” In his testing he sacrificed “almost the whole of them, reducing the number to some seventy, and then ultimately to some eight or ten.” One of the ten was the importation “rough purple Chili.” Seed from this potato pollinated by one of the other nine varieties in the research plot produced the Garnet Chili Potato in 1853. He distributed the Garnet Chili throughout the country at cost. Upon his death he had $50 to his name. But he had given the country a potato that would provide genetics for 90% of the potatoes created in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Goodrich described the Garnet Chili in the field: “Vines tall and stout like the parent, remaining erect until nearly ripe. Vines and leaves very light green; flowers numerous and persistent”[American Agriculturist 21 (1862), 230]. They are colored pale lilac. As to the tubers: medium sized, roundish to oval in configuration, the Garnet Chili has a pinkish red skin, deep set eyes, and white flesh. The skin is sometimes characterized as flaky. It was a late season potato and tolerated most growing conditions except extreme heat. It did best in cooler climates and was admired for its productivity. [Modern cultivars greatly exceed the Garnet Chili in productivity in 2020.] It resisted blight better than the American crop potatoes of the 1850s, but was not invulnerable. Its flavor was nutty, and its texture more waxy than starchy, winning it favor as a salad potato. The largest potatoes sometimes suffered from a cavity forming in the heart of the potato, so much work was done by breeders to eliminate the fault. In the consuming public, a decided preference for Garnet Chili Potatoes of middling size developed in the 1870s.
Because the eyes of the potato are used to propagate the crop, sunken eyes proved a liability since it was difficult to cut them into separate sections for planting. Almost immediately potato breeders sought to create a version of the Garnet Chili that had shallow or protuberant eyes. Albert Bresee of Hubbardton Vermont, produced a slew of other potato varieties using Garnet Chili as parent stock. His method of breeding mirrored Goodrich’s, planting other varieties to pollinate the Garnet Chili and growing new type potatoes from seed. Bresee’s most famous potato, Early Rose [see entry], soon became the most widely grown potato in America as fields were replanted with “new and vigorous” potatoes. Seed from the Early Rose in turn produced the Burbank Russet Potato, a discovery of the teenaged Luther Burbank.
Productivity and resistance to diseases such as scab, black scurf, and ring rot made the Garnet Chili the foundation of modern potato varieties. Most people agreed that the smoother, less textured Early Rose had a superior taste and mouth feel to the Garnet Chili, which was always characterized as “good.” Almost immediately cooks decreed that the Garnet Chili performed best when boiled and used in salads. The Burbank Russet was a superior baking potato to the Garnet Chili. But the Garnet Chili would sometimes produced half again more bushels per acre than Early Rose with the same amount of fertilizer on similar soils and one quarter more than the Burbank. When B. K. Bliss of New York nationalized potato seed production in the 1870s, he determined that the major crop potatoes supplied to American growers would possess Goodrich ancestry. His own introductions depended upon Garnet Chili genetics, sometimes admixed with Goodrich’s other important potato lines—Cuzo, Early Goodrich, Harrison, and Gleason. If you visit a grocery produce section in 2021 you will see many popular potatoes that have the Garnet Chili as an ancestor, even Yukon Gold.
The Garnet Chili Potato is maintained by several institutions. It is in the Kenosha Potato Collection and in most Western national germ plasm banks. Ronninger Potato Farm LLC in Orchard City Colorado is the only public source for seed potatoes of this famed variety.