Great Moments in Culinary History: The Potato Chip
The creation of the potato chip was one of the greatest moments in culinary history, but who came up with the idea to fry a thin potato until crispy?
Some foods are so ubiquitously ingrained into our culinary culture that we seldom give a second thought as to their origin. If you think about it, you probably have no idea where some of your favorite snacks came from and how or why they were created.
Get ready because your curiosity and your taste buds are about to be satisfied!
The Potato Chip
Potato chips have been a part of my life for just about as long as I can remember. I don’t consume them as much as I used to but they will always have a place in my life.
When I was just a little pre-chef of about 6 years old, my Dad and I would sometimes have chips and dip for dinner. Yep, that's right, he would get potato chips and tortilla chips and this assortment of five different dips for dinner, (at least that’s how I remember it) it was fantastic!
As my taste in chips changed from the standard Lays™ and Ruffles™ to the crisper kettle-style chips I began to question the origin of these impressive morsels of greatness.
While I searched for answers in my quest for the origin of the potato chip, I came across a supposed story of customer dissatisfaction and chef irritation, another one of those pesky culinary legends.
As the potato chip legend would have it by the late nineteenth century, a popular version of the story attributed the snack to George Crum, a cook at Moon's Lake House Restaurant who was trying to appease an irate customer.
This very “reasonable” customer kept repeatedly sending back his French-fried potatoes, complaining that they were too thick, too "soggy", or not salted enough. Frustrated, Crum sliced several potatoes extremely thin, fried them to a crisp, and seasoned them with extra salt.
To his surprise, the customer loved them. This does sound very tasty but I’m sure that this cook was not happy that his act of culinary vengeance fell upon the refined tastebuds of a man who knew great chips.
A version of this story appeared in a 1973 national advertising campaign by St. Regis Paper Company which manufactured packaging for chips. They claimed that Crum's customer was the railroad baron, Cornelius Vanderbilt.
Crum was already renowned as a chef at the time, and he owned a lakeside restaurant by 1860 which he called Crum's House.
There is however some debate as to the validity of this story due to the recipe for potato chips being found in an 1817 cookbook, authored by an optician and amateur cook by the name of William Kitchiner called The Cook’s Oracle.
The Cook’s Oracle made William Kitchiner a household name and effectively christened him the first celebrity chef as well as a best-selling author.
Contrary to most food writers of the day Mr. Kitchiner was known for actually performing all of the household tasks that he wrote about, from cooking to cleaning up afterward, he did it all himself.
His book contained eleven different recipes for ketchup or catsup, however you like to say it, I prefer the latter. Having created so many catsup recipes this man no doubt loved his potatoes. His cookbook refers to cooking thin potatoes in slices or shavings as crisps.
The “crisps” that William Kitchiner produced sound remarkably like a vintage potato dish called Cottage Fries which are potatoes sliced about 1/4 in thick and fried in lard or beef tallow. Potatoes, fat, and salt, sound great!
With Cottage Fries being thicker than potato chips, maybe the recipe in The Cook’s Oracle would result in something similar to the potatoes seen in this video below.
It is possible that George Crum very well could have been the first person to slice a potato as thin as the chips we enjoy today. No matter what a chef tells you, this includes me, we hate having food sent back, we hate it!
We hate it even more when the customer sends food back over and over again because their palate can’t decide what it wants at that particular moment.
Cook’s rage is a real thing, this guy George Crum could have been so irritated that he meticulously sliced potatoes thinner than he ever had before and made them crispier than he thought would be tolerable.
He was wrong, his hate plate of over-crisp, thin fried potatoes became the legendary potato chip that we know and love today. As for which story is true, who knows, I think both men earned their place in culinary history.
Great topic! And interesting! I remember several decades ago (I'm seventy five years old now), my circumstances changed suddenly. I had no money and a fifty pound. sack of potatoes. I'm sure you can guess that I made good use of those wonderful potatoes. I cooked quite a few frying pans full of them. They were very similar to the type you spoke of in your article. Extremely delicious! I think at that particular time, they were somehow beneficial to my mental health as well.
This reminds me of whenever any customer would send something back because it wasn't spicy enough.
Oh, we've got you covered. Hang on just a few minutes while we make something so unholy, nobody would want to touch it.