potato [M16th] ‘Let the sky rain potatoes’, says Falstaff in Shakespeare’s play The Merry Wives of Windsor. A bizarre wish, you would think, until you know that he is referring to sweet potatoes, believed in the 16th and 17th centuries to have aphrodisiac qualities. Falstaff is in fact praying for erotic prowess. The first vegetable referred to as a potato in English was the sweet potato, introduced to Europe before the common white potato that we are most familiar with today. By the late 16th century, when white potatoes had appeared in England from America, the word was being applied to the new arrival. It comes from Spanish patata, a variant of an old Caribbean word batata ‘sweet potato’.