From the Peruvian Andes, the potato found its way across the Atlantic in the 1500s. No one can say with certainty how it came to Ireland, though one consistent story has it that potatoes washed ashore after the wreck of the Spanish fleet in 1588. Scholars have disproven a long-held English version: that Sir Walter Raleigh first planted this miracle of starch and nutrition on his estate near Cork in 1589. And it likely didn’t come from Scotland, where clerics banned the potato because it wasn’t mentioned in the Bible.
