As American As Tree Potato Pie

Potatoes. Or pommes de terre as the French call them which translates into something like ‘apples from the ground’. Elsewhere in Europe, the Dutch call them aardappels (literally, earth apples). There are probably more but this is where my polyglotism ends and I haven’t got time to Google it.

This has always struck me as odd as barring a vaguely similar crunchy texture, potatoes aren’t green, sweet or likely to keep doctors away. The French/Dutch must have eaten some pretty ropey apples in order to draw a comparison between them and the muddy hunks of irregular root they dug up and decided to munch. (Adopt Dutch accent: “Heng on cheps, these rooty things have the tixture and taste of epples, but grow underground. Therefore we shall call them earth epples.”)

In moments of idle speculation I wonder: if they’d been familiar with spuds before discovered the palatability of apples, would apples now be called tree potatoes?