Kitchen Confidence: National Potato Chip Day

NATIONAL POTATO CHIP DAY

America’s #1 snack food is recognized each year on March 14th. On National Potato Chip Day, this snack will be enjoyed by millions of people across the country.
How the popular potato chip came to be.
On August 24, 1853, an unhappy restaurant customer, complaining that his potatoes were too thick and soggy, kept sending them back. Chef George Crum decided to slice the potatoes as thin as possible, frying them until crisp and added extra salt. To the chef’s surprise, the customer loved them, and they soon became a regular item on the restaurant’s menu under the name of “Saratoga Chips.”
Alternative explanations of the beginning of potato chips date them to recipes in Shilling Cookery for the People by Alexis Soyer (1845) or Mary Randolph’s The Virginia House-Wife (1824). There are many references between these dates to sliced potatoes being fried in grease but whether they were fried to a crisp is not clear.
What is clear is that by the late 1870s, the term “Saratoga Chips” was being widely used as a standard menu item on train cars, hotel restaurants, and street carts. The name carried on into grocers when the chips were made in larger batches by bakeries. They shipped them by wagon to the restaurants and grocers by the barrel, and the grocers would then sell to private families by the pound. Folks were instructed to bake the chips in a hot oven for a few minutes, and they would be as crisp as if fried that same day.
The Dayton, Ohio-based Mike-sell’s Potato Chip Company, founded in 1910, calls itself the “oldest potato chip company in the United States.” New England-based Tri-Sum Potato Chips, originally established in 1908 as the Leominster Potato Chip Company, in Leominster, Massachusetts, claims to be America’s first potato chip manufacturer.
In the 20th century, potato chips spread beyond chef-cooked restaurant fare and began to be mass-produced for home consumption.
Flavored chips were introduced in the 1950s.
Potato Chip revenues are over $15 billion a year worldwide!
HOW TO OBSERVE
Grab a bag of potato chips to enjoy and use #NationalPotatoChipDay to post on social media.
HISTORY :
Within our research, we were unable to identify the creator of National Potato Chip Day.

History and myth :

The Story of the Invention of the Potato Chip Is a Myth
Everyone knows the potato chip was invented in Saratoga Springs, NY in 1853. Except it wasn’t.

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. In the kitchen, George Crum, the half African American, half Native American cook, prepared the meal, likely woodcock or partridge from the restaurant’s grounds, served with french fries. But when the plate was presented to Vanderbilt, he refused it. The french fries were too thick, Vanderbilt said.

Crum did not take the criticism well. In his anger, the cook shaved the thinnest possible pieces of potato into hot oil and fried them to a crisp. He sent the browned and brittle rounds to the table as an insult, but Commodore Vanderbilt, as he was known, was thrilled with the novel snack. The proprietress Harriet Moon soon declared that these chips would henceforth be served in delicate paper cornucopias as the signature dish of Moon’s Lake House. In later years, Crum opened his own restaurant, Crum’s Place, nearby. There, millionaires like Vanderbilt would stand in line for hours for “Saratoga chips.”

More than 150 years later Crum’s delicacy has gone on to even greater fame; today, Americans consume about 1.5 billion pounds of potato chips every year.

That’s the oft-repeated story about the invention of the potato chip. It’s a good one, an origin story that crosses cultural and economic boundaries for a snack food that does the same. Except for one small thing: That’s not what happened.

The true origin of the crispy fried potato will probably never be known.
In almost all its particulars, the story of George Crum’s deep-fried stunt is wrong. Cornelius Vanderbilt is falsely accused of being the difficult customer; in fact, he spent that summer touring Europe with his family (though he did frequent Saratoga). The Moons, who play a small but instrumental role in the story, did not purchase the Lake House until 1854. And, most importantly, crispy fried potatoes were not new to Saratoga in the summer of 1853. A New York Herald report from the Lake House in July of 1849 introduced readers to “Eliza, the cook,” whose “potato frying reputation is one of the prominent matters of remark at Saratoga.” “Who would think,” the Herald reporter wrote, “that simple potatoes could be made such a luxury!”

Academics have spent years unwinding the facts from these fictions, even as the Potato Chip/Snack Food Association placed a historical marker (soon stolen) near the site of the Lake House in 1976, honoring Crum’s culinary contribution.

Crum died in 1914. But in the 1980s—when there were still a few people in Saratoga Springs who had known him—the folklorists William S. Fox and Mae G. Banner traced the evolution of the legend. Moon’s Lake House received credit for the potato chip in the mid-1800s. The first known mention of Crum’s involvement dated to 1885. And Vanderbilt was first introduced in an advertisement produced 120 years after the supposed invention.

The black-and-white ad for the St. Regis Paper Company, which produced potato chip packaging, included a portrait of Crum beneath the headline: “This man cooked for Commodore Vanderbilt and Jay Gould and created a billion dollar business to boot.” A 1977 cookbook by a Vanderbilt descendent made the Commodore more central, anointing the allegedly fussy customer as the “founder of the potato chip.”

More recently, the historian Dave Mitchell investigated the people credited with the creation of the potato chip—including Eliza, Vanderbilt, both of the Moons, Crum’s sister Kate Wicks, restaurant manager Hiram Thomas, and various Lake House cooks. Mitchell’s investigation included the possibility that the potato chip was not invented in Saratoga at all (though it certainly earned its popularity there). The true origin of the crispy fried potato, Mitchell concluded, will probably never be known.

https://daily.jstor.org/story-invention-potato-chip-myth/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato_chip