Was thinking about this the other day in terms of, the Shire must have had its own varieties of European fruit and veg that were cultivated by hobbits, and then somehow eventually lost or that went back to wild varieties with their different priorities before being bred back to domestic standards again.
Indigenous Western European fruits, like the forest apple and wild pear, tend to be bitter and mealy rather than sweet, and need to be harvested at winter before the sweetness starts to enter the fruit. Likewise, berries like Alpine strawberry, raspberries, bilberries, etc, are usually very tart or sharp rather than sweet, and tend to be small.
For veg, hardy roots would be more akin to wild carrots and parsnips. Long, thin fingers which could be cultivated to produce higher sugar content in colder seasons. Modern varieties of carrots were cultivated in Afghanistan, but the precursors would have had ancestors in Europe where they are indigenous.
Which is mostly just to say that the vegetable Sam would have held up and called po-tay-to would have probably looked something like this:
And also hobbits probably would have liked spicy food and put horseradish and spicy mustard on everything. Myrosinase, the compound that makes horseradish and mustard spicy, is also what does the trick in wasabi and modern varieties have by and large been bred to have less of it (to make it safer if livestock eats some). Cabbage, cress, lettuce, gourds, mushrooms, nuts, lots of leafy greens and pungent herbs, bitter pomes and sharp acidic berries (think sea buckthorn), and a likelihood of any citrus being very sour. Grains would probably be most like oats, wheat, barley, and rye. Sweetness and saltiness would have been coveted flavors but not that common.
Then there are the European winter crops like medlar and sloe, which have to be harvested in late autumn and "ripened" or rather, bletted, in winter (a process where they are stored in cool cellars or the like and essentially permitted to rot to a point where they actually become more edible). Assuming the Shire had a very English climate and accounting for the underground dwellings of hobbits, it seems likely that bletting was a common practice among hobbits to get nutritional needs met over winter, and they might have had an even stronger preference for winter fruits and vegetables and cultivated their own unique varieties, as well fermenting such crops into wines and preserves both for themselves and for trade.
