Fortunately, the early inhabitants of South America, where the plant grows wild, learned to discard the fruit and instead tucked into the starchy, vitamin-rich swellings at the ends of the plant’s underground stems.

When the Spanish conquered the Americas in the 15th century, Europeans also began to get a taste for these grubby little tubers, along with tomatoes themselves, and another member of the family, tobacco. But what to call them?

The Elizabethans already had “potatoes” - the bulbous, pink-skinned roots that we now know as sweet potatoes and known in their native Haiti as “batata”. So they simply transferred the name. Hey presto: instant potato!

But whatever you call it (the French went for “earth apple” while Swedes, who lent their own name to an orange turnip, plumped for jordparon: “earth pear”) the potato is now top vegetable, grown in 125 countries worldwide in quantities surpassed only by the cereals.

It wasn’t until the 18th century that consumption took off in Britain. But by 1800, the spud (the word may be related to “spade”) had replaced bread and cheese as the staple diet of the workers, helping to rid them of scurvy with its generous vitamin C content. In Ireland, where the plant liked the peaty soil, a one-vegetable economy quickly developed.

Then in 1845, that one vegetable was blighted by a fungus. For five successive years, Phytophthora infestans rotted the crop, causing the worst famine in 19th-century Europe and triggering a great wave of Irish emigration.

Modern potatoes, particularly early varieties, are less susceptible to blight. And although the dreaded Colorado beetle was for many years the star of government poster campaigns, the biggest threat to this most easily grown of all crops is actually the common slug.

And once lifted from the soil (if the growing tubers are exposed to sunlight, they become green and toxic) potatoes have more culinary potential than almost any other plant. The trick, as we now know, is to ignore those tomato-like fruits and dig a little deeper.