The origin of potatoe chips

The potato chip was born on August 24, 1853 in another elegant dining room: this one, at the fashionable Moon Lake Lodge Image:Georgcrum.gifin Saratoga, New York. A testy older diner, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, sent his food back to the kitchen, complaining that the fried potatoes were not sliced thin enough and were too soggy. The cook, George Crum, cut and fried a thinner batch, but these, too, were rejected. Equally testy, Crum decided to fight back by slicing the potatoes wafer-thin, frying them to a crisp in boiling oil and over-salting them. They were too crisp to eat: they could not be pierced with a fork without shatteringand no gentleman of the day would have dreamed of picking up food with his fingers at the dining table. But Crum's fit of pique was rewarded with compliments to the chef: the Commodore loved the "crunch potato slices." Other diners requested the potatoes ("I'll have what he's having"), which began to appear on the menu as Saratoga Chips, a house specialty. Soon they were packaged and sold, first locally, then throughout the New England area. "Saratoga Chips" became a hit and Crum eventually opened his own restaurant across the lake, featuring them. There is an old photo of a gift box, much like a box of salt water taffy, with an engraving of what may be Crums lodge and the words "The Original Saratoga Chips, Saratoga Specialties, Saratoga, N.Y."

A great story, but is it true? Well, according to Wikipedia the Vanderbilt part isn't true, although they give no reference for this statement. But is the other part true; was the potatoe chip invented by George Crum in Saratoga in 1853? There doesn't seem to be much discussion about this on the net, although on the Wikipedia talk-page contributor "Gazh" says "but i'd bet against it, I'm going to do a bit of googling, but i think the first Crisps may have been fried before the USA was colonised." In a slightly animated discussion on the use of the word Chips rather than the british term "Crisps". That doesn't sound too wild an assumption but popular myth hasn't relinquished it's hold of chips history. Potatoe chips were invented in 1853.

Stopping, for the moment, at the fact that potato is indigenous to the western hemisphere, and therefore the most likely area where the potatoes chip was invented, another objection raised to the idea of Crum as the inventor of the potatoes chip is the anonymous suggestion (on Wikipedia) that it seems unlikely that, "in the many centuries before European colonization, that it had never occurred to the indigenous peoples of the Americas to cook potatoes in fat". However, if they did we don't have a written source for this (as far as I know) so a refutation of the inventor myth isn't to be found there (yet). Yet, another anonymous contributor on Wikipedia raises the reasonable objection that the potatoes "introduction to the cuisines of Europe is contemporary with the European colonization of the Americas. Lack of documentary or physical proof aside, that leaves an awfully small window of time for the potato chip/crisp to be invented in Europe before the territory of the present-day United States was colonized." As noted on the same page the (supposedly) earliest documentation of frying as a method of preparing potatoes is from 18th century "but frying potatoes isn't making chips". So can we move towards chips from fried potatoes on the eastern banks of the Atlantic? Do we in fact have documentation of potatoe chips being made in Europe earlier than 1853?

That the idea of making thin potatoe based "cakes" did actually exist long before Mr Crum got angry with his customer (whoever he was). In Europe. In "The Country Housewife and Lady's Director, Part II" published in England in 1732 we find a recipe for Mrs Mary Gordon's Potatoe Bisquits. These are made in the oven from flavoured mashed potatoes. Supposing for a moment that these bisquits could be rolled pretty thin, much like Swedish "Ginger snaps", we have a kind of "proto-chips". I don't think we are quite near a potatoes chip as we know them yet though. But the idea was definitely there as early as in the mid 18th century. We find another kind of thin "fried potatoe" in 1840 now in the Philadelphia published "Directions for Cookery". That isn't a potatoe chip either. However, what is clear, is that the potatoes chip most probably wasn't invented by any one person, but in several places independently. Because, as we can see, another "proto-chip" recipe is given in "The Cook's Oracle" from 1829 (and this is the 7th edition) which has a recipe for "frying potatoe shavings in lard" and now we are talking about potatoes as thin as cutting "them in shavings round and round, as you would peel a lemon". Taking it from there, and simplifying things to simply "shave" the slices off of a potatoe isn't far at all. And if you do that and "fry" it in enough fat, you have potatoes chips.

So I am pretty convinced that the popular myth is wrong in stating that the potatoes chips were invented in the US in 1853. I would rather suggest it was "invented" in several different places independently from each other at various times. But that isn't as good a story.