The merits of America’s greatest inventions are often controversial. The phone: Alexander Graham Bell or Elisha Gray? Radio: Guglielmo Marconi or Nicola Tesla? The plane: Gustave Whitehead or the Wright brothers?
Add to this illustrious list: potato chips.
The most common origin story of the potato chip concerns Moon’s Lake House, a popular eatery in the resort town of Saratoga Springs, NY But even there at least five different men and women have been credited as its creator. . Additionally, food historians suggest that the chip was probably not invented in Saratoga – and perhaps not at all in the United States.
Saratoga’s story
Here is the most popular potato chip legend: One day in 1853, Shipping and Railroad Baron Cornelius Vanderbilt was dining at Moon’s Lake House. Disappointed with the fried potatoes he had been served, he sent them back to the kitchen, asking for thinner slices. George Crum, a famous chief of Native American and black heritage, took umbrage at the request and, in an “I’ll show him!” mood, sliced the potatoes as thin as they could, fried them until crisp, and served them to Vanderbilt. To Crum’s surprise, Vanderbilt loved them and the potato chip was born.
This version of events finally became so well established that in 1976, American heritage the magazine would dub Crum, also known as George Speck, “Edison of Grease”.
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Unfortunately, there are several issues with the story of Crum. For one thing, if there was a disgruntled dinner party, it sure wasn’t Vanderbilt. “There is no truth in history,” historian TJ Stiles concluded in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography. The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt.
On the other hand, Crum’s supposed role in the invention of the potato chip seems to have gone largely unrecognized during his lifetime, even though he was widely known in the United States and famous for his brook trout, sea bass, woodcock. and its partridge, among other dishes. perhaps the first famous chef in America. In 1889, a writer from New York Herald called him “the best cook in the land” without a word about potatoes. Most of his obituaries in 1914 make no mention of the potato chip at all, and those who simply say he “would have” made it up.
Three years later, an obituary by 103-year-old Catherine Adkins Wicks claimed that she was in fact “the maker of the potato chip”. Wicks, who was Crum’s sister, worked alongside him in the kitchen and was colloquially known as Aunt Kate or Aunt Katie. In a twist on the Disgruntled Dinner story, it was she, and not Crum, who carved thin foil potatoes in a moment of pique. In another account, she accidentally dropped a thin slice into a pan of boiling fat while peeling potatoes, scooped it up with a fork, and had her eureka moment.
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Crum and Wicks weren’t the only posthumous contenders for the title. In his obituaries of 1907, Hiram S. Thomas was widely recognized as “the inventor of the Saratoga chips”. A prominent black hotelier, referred to in an obituary as “beside Booker T. Washington” as one of the area’s best-known African Americans, Thomas ran Moon’s Lake House for about a decade. However, that was in the 1890s, some 40 years after the discovery of Crum and / or Wicks – and a good decade after the chips became commercially available far beyond Saratoga.
Emeline Jones is another notable who has received credit in her obituaries. Recognized as a cook to the rich, famous and powerful in New York and Washington, DC, Jones, who was also black, had briefly worked at Moon’s Lake House under Hiram S. Thomas earlier in her career. So, while it’s possible that she learned how to make crisps there, it seems unlikely that she was present at the creation.
A more recent theory, apparently first put forward by Vanderbilt biographer Stiles, is that Lake House chips even precede Crum and Wicks. Another New York Herald article, this one from 1849, notes the “fame of Eliza, the cook”, for her crispy potatoes “, adding that” dozens of people visit the lake and take away specimens of the vegetable, as prepared by her , like curiosities. Unfortunately, Eliza’s last name and everything about her seems lost in history.
A wife bringing her husband beer and potato chips while he relaxes, c. 1965
L. Willinger / FPG / Getty Images
Whether or not someone in Saratoga Springs invented potato chips, the city has certainly done a lot to popularize them. For years they were known as Saratoga chips, and they are still sold under that name today.
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In the beginning, Saratoga chips were a gourmet delicacy served in good hotels and restaurants. Diners at the Cadillac Hotel in Detroit could enjoy them with a chicken aspic salad. Passengers aboard the luxury liner RMS Berengaria munched on theirs alongside roasted pheasant. Wealthy families whose cooks mastered the art of chipmaking could purchase a sterling silver Saratoga chip server from Tiffany to distribute them elegantly.
Usually handmade and often served in waxed paper bags, freshly fried snack chips tended to have a short shelf life, making them a hyperlocal and highly fragmented business proposition. It wasn’t until the 1930s that two companies, Lay’s and Fritos – the latter of which made their crisps from corn, not potatoes – began their ascent to become national brands mass-producing and distributing snack foods. popular. Over time, of course, potato chips have become a universal treat, with potato chips alone becoming a $ 10 billion industry in the United States.
Was a British doctor the real inventor?
But if the chips weren’t born in Saratoga, where did they come from? Food historians suggest they date back to at least 1817, when an English physician named William Kitchiner released the first edition of his pioneering cookbook, The Cook’s Oracle, published in the British and American editions. One recipe, “Sliced French Fries,” sounds remarkably like today’s crisps. Subsequent reviews called the dish “sliced or shaved fried potatoes”.
While Kitchiner may have been the first to publish a potato chip recipe, that doesn’t mean he made it up. In fact, given the ubiquity of the potato – long a staple food in the world – it seems likely that the potato chip has been invented and reinvented by countless cooks, perhaps for centuries.
For serious nibblers, the question of who actually invented the chip may be irrelevant, anyway. The important thing is that someone has done it.
