The potato in Russia (writing day 13) I don't have enough time to write a good large entry today, so I wrote this short text 😅 It's hard for me to imagine what was included in the Russian diet in ancient times. So many ingredients which today is grown all over the country were unknown to medieval Russians. Potatoes, cucumbers, and tomatoes weren't grown in Russia, and a lot of other plants were imported from the New World and Southeast Asia. When the potato was first introduced in Russia, it was very unpopular. It was considered to be poisonous (a lot of farmers were poisoned with solanine) and used to called "devil's apple". It took a long time to become common, and it needed government interventions - for instance, there used to be laws mandating the cultivation of potatoes in many districts. The offenders were supposed to be exiled to Belarus to build the Babruysk fortress. It's so commonly found in Russian cuisine in modern times that it in fact becomes more difficult to name a dish without it than with it.