GENEVA -- The potato has been a mainstay of home cooking the world over for centuries but a new cookbook launched by the United Nations shows there's more to the humble spud than just chips, crisps or mash.

In Italy they stuff them with mascarpone, in Germany they turn them into sausages and in Moldova they're blended into soup with cheese and chives.

These are just a few of the recipes published in "The Potato: Around the Globe in 200 Recipes," unveiled Thursday by the UN's Economic Commission for Europe to mark the International Year of the Potato.

The cookbook shows how truly international the potato has become in the centuries following its transportation to Europe by the first explorers to Latin America -- including English maritime hero Sir Walter Raleigh, who presented the exotic vegetable to Queen Elizabeth I.

From "Boranie Katschalu" in Afghanistan (fried potatoes, cheese, garlic and mint) to a chicken, veal, potato and banana stew from Venezuela ("Sancocho"), the book shows the versatility of the vegetable and what can be done with a bit of imagination.

It's the world's fourth most important food after maize, wheat and rice, and it's also good for you, rich in carbohydrates, potassium and Vitamin C.

"The potato is one of the world's healthiest root vegetables, with a larger high-quality protein content than that of other roots and tubers," said UNECE official Pier Giacomo Bianchi, who is in charge of standardizing seed potatoes to facilitate international trade in the crop.

"We work towards ensuring that only healthy and high-yielding seed potatoes enter the international market," he said.

Not all the recipes assembled scream healthy living, however.

Take "Caramel potatoes" from Denmark, for example (as the name suggests, boiled potatoes coated and fried in sugar and butter), or "Herring under a fur coat" from Russia -- boiled potato slices stacked between layers of herring, carrots, eggs, cream, mayonnaise and beetroot.

But Sergei Malanitchev, the head of UNECE's Agricultural Quality Standards Section and himself a Russian, said that as far as he was concerned, "less is more" for getting the best out of potatoes.

"The less you process the natural product, the better. All these fried dishes, for me they are not healthy," he told journalists.

"The easiest and healthiest way to cook potatoes -- this is what we do in my family, and we think that the results are quite good -- is just to cook potatoes in a vapor, add some oil, olive oil or sunflower, some vegetables, add some fish, and this is a delicious meal."