Why do Russians eat potatoes without the skin?

[Evgeny Steiner]

According to Van Gogh's The Potato Eaters and his several sketches titled
The Potato Peeler or Peeling Potatoes (all painted in 1885 in Nuenen), Dutch
peasants back then were closer to Russians than to modern Americans.

Evgeny

On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 3:17 PM, Helen Halva <hhalva at mindspring.com> wrote:

> I was introduced to the skins of baked potatoes as a small child by a
> friend my own age before 1950; in my grandparents' farm family we always ate
> boiled "new" potatoes with the skins on. I think they did become popular as
> appetizers, with cheese and bacon, in the 1970's or '80's.
>
>
> Don Livingston wrote:
>
>> I wonder if there has been a shift in US attitudes towards potatoes eaten
>> with their skins on? To my memory, in the sixties (in Arizona) we always
>> ate
>> the center of our baked potatoes, but never the skins.  In the early
>> seventies I remember being quite surprised when I first saw someone eat a
>> baked potato skin, and I also recall a college conversation in the
>> eighties
>> where one of my friends insisted that one did not have to clean the
>> potatoes
>> before baking them.  (Potatoes sold in standard grocery stores at the time
>> were already washed, so she felt one did not have to wash them again.)  I
>> concluded at the time that if one intended to eat the skins, one scrubbed
>> them again before cooking which had two effects:  1- it removed what
>> little
>> dirt remained, and 2- it made the skins thinner and more tender since we
>> used a stiff plastic vegetable brush to scrub them.
>>
>> So from my solipsistic perspective, eating potatoes skin-on was less
>> common
>> in the sixties, more common in the seventies, and very common from the
>> eighties onward.  Perhaps people older than I can fill in the years
>> previous
>> to that?
>>
>

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