A pharmacist famous for his potatoes

The description “parmentier” is a fancy way of saying that a dish is made with potato, especially puréed or mashed potato. The term is a tribute to a French pharmacist, one Antoine-Augustin Parmentier (1737– 1813), who is famous for promoting potatoes as a food at a time when the French considered them only fit for use as animal fodder.

Parmentier was apprenticed at 18 to a Parisian apothecary but then chose to enlist in Louis XV’s army. During the Seven Years War against Prussia (1756–63) he was captured five times and, as a prisoner of war, was fed only on potatoes, which the French knew only as pig feed, believing them to be indigestible or even poisonous and a cause of leprosy.

Back in Paris after the war, Parmentier completed his pharmacy training and secured the prestigious post of apothecary at L’Hôtel des Invalides, the king’s hospital and retirement home for old soldiers. He also studied nutritional chemistry and when France’s wheat crop failed in 1769, causing widespread panic, he entered a national competition for the best study of “food substances capable of reducing the calamities of famine”, winning the gold medal for his paper on the chemical analysis of potatoes.

Parmentier went on to campaign imaginatively on behalf of the potato. After winning the approval of the newly crowned Louis XVI and his queen Marie Antoinette, he introduced the potato to Paris’s high society by hosting lavish dinners at which potato featured in every course.

Turning his attention to the poorer classes, he grew potatoes on a patch of army land offered by the king. The plot was patrolled by soldiers during the day but deliberately left unguarded at night so that the locals could creep in and steal the crop.

By the time of France’s next famine, in 1785, the potato had become accepted. Parmentier opened potato soup kitchens across Paris, delivering bowls of steaming potage to the starving masses.

During the French Revolution, the Paris Commune enrolled the potato as a “revolutionary food” and made its consumption compulsory. And after the Revolution, Parmentier went on to find equal favour with Napoleon, under whom he became inspector-general of the health service — a role in which he was responsible for the first mandatory smallpox vaccination campaign.

Parmentier lives on in the hearts and minds of his countrymen. He has been commemorated on a French postage stamp and is remembered in the names of many French streets and a Paris Métro station.