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Aug 29, 2024 · potato. potato chip, a thin slice of potato fried in oil or baked in an oven until crisp. It may be salted or flavoured after cooking. The invention of the potato chip is attributed to George Crum, who was born George Speck in 1824, the son of an African American father and a Native American mother who was a member of the Huron people.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Room temperature. Media: Potato chip. A potato chip (NAmE and AuE; often just chip) or crisp (BrE and IrE) is a thin slice of potato (or a thin deposit of potato paste) that has been deep fried, baked, or air fried until crunchy. They are commonly served as a snack, side dish, or appetizer.
Jan 13, 2020 · Legend has it that the potato chip was born out of a tiff between a little-known cook and one of the wealthiest people in American history. The incident was alleged to have taken place on August 24, 1853. George Crum, who was half African and half native American, was working as a cook at a resort in Saratoga Springs, New York at the time.
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It's complicated.
The credit for America’s greatest inventions is often a matter of controversy. The telephone: Alexander Graham Bell or Elisha Gray? The radio: Guglielmo Marconi or Nicola Tesla? The airplane: Gustave Whitehead or the Wright Brothers?
Add to that illustrious list: the potato chip.
The most common origin story for the potato chip involves Moon’s Lake House, a popular restaurant in the resort town of Saratoga Springs, N.Y. But even there, at least five different men and women have been credited as its creator. What’s more, food historians suggest the chip probably wasn’t invented in Saratoga—and possibly not in the U.S. at all.
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The most popular potato chip legend goes like this: One day in 1853, the shipping and railroad baron Cornelius Vanderbilt was dining at Moon’s Lake House. Disappointed by the fried potatoes he’d been served, he sent them back to the kitchen, asking for more thinly sliced ones. George Crum, a famed chef of Native American and Black heritage, took umbrage at the request and, in an “I’ll show him!” mood, sliced some potatoes as thin as he could, fried them to a crisp and served them to Vanderbilt. To Crum’s surprise, Vanderbilt loved them, and the potato chip was born.
This version of events eventually became so well-established that, in 1976, American Heritage magazine would dub Crum, also known as George Speck, the “Edison of Grease.”
Unfortunately, there are several problems with the Crum story. For one, if there was a disgruntled diner, it almost certainly wasn’t Vanderbilt. “There is no truth to the tale,” historian T.J. Stiles concluded in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt.
For another, Crum’s supposed role in inventing the potato chip seems to have gone largely unrecognized in his lifetime, even though he was widely known across the U.S. and celebrated for his brook trout, lake bass, woodcock and partridge, among other dishes—making him perhaps the first celebrity chef in America. In 1889, a writer in the New York Herald called him “the best cook in the country,” with nary a word about potatoes. Most of his obituaries, in 1914, don’t mention the potato chip at all, and those that do simply say that he was “said to have” invented it.
Three years later, an obituary for Catherine Adkins Wicks, age 103, maintained that she, in fact, “was said to be the originator of the potato chip.” Wicks, who was Crum’s sister, worked alongside him in the kitchen and was familiarly known as Aunt Kate or Aunt Katie. In one variation of the disgruntled diner story, it is she, not Crum, who carved potatoes paper-thin in a moment of pique. In another telling, she accidentally dropped a thin slice into a boiling pot of fat while peeling potatoes retrieved it with a fork, and had her eureka moment.
Crum and Wicks weren’t the only posthumous claimants to the title. In his 1907 obituaries, Hiram S. Thomas was widely credited as “the inventor of Saratoga chips.” A prominent Black hotelier referred to in one obituary as “next to Booker T. Washington" as one of the most well-known African Americans in the region, Thomas ran Moon’s Lake House for about a decade. However, that was in the 1890s, some 40 years after the Crum and/or Wicks discovery—and a good decade after the chips had become commercially available far beyond Saratoga.
But if potato chips weren’t born in Saratoga, where did they come from? Food historians suggest they go back to at least 1817 when an English doctor named William Kitchiner came out with the first edition of his pioneering cookbook, The Cook’s Oracle, published in both British and American editions. One recipe, “potatoes fried in slices,” sounds remarkably like today’s potato chip. Later revisions referred to the dish as “potatoes fried in slices or shavings.”
While Kitchiner may have been the first to publish a potato chip recipe, that doesn’t mean he invented it. In fact, given the ubiquity of the potato—long a staple throughout the world—it seems likely that the potato chip has been invented and reinvented by countless cooks, possibly for centuries.
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May 4, 2017 · Everyone knows the potato chip was invented in Saratoga Springs, NY in 1853. Except it wasn’t. The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR. In the summer of 1853, in the cavernous dining room of Moon’s Lake House in Saratoga Springs, New York, Cornelius Vanderbilt, a wealthy steamship owner, waited for his dinner.
Brandon Tensley. January 2022. The origins of the crunchy snack date back to at least the 1800s. Lisa Shin. When Covid-19 forced people to stay home, many of us found solace in a snack: potato ...
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Dec 22, 2023 · The story of potato chips is a tale of accidental invention, culinary evolution, and cultural significance. From George Crum’s serendipitous creation to today’s vast array of flavors and styles, potato chips have become much more than a snack – they are a part of our shared global heritage.
