The potato chip remained otherwise unseasoned until an important scientific development in the 1950s. In an idea originated by the Smiths Potato Crisps Company Ltd, formed in 1920, Frank Smith packaged a twist of salt with his chips in greaseproof paper bags, which were sold around London. The 'Saratoga Chips' brand name still exists today.Īn advertisement for Smith's Potato Crisps Crum was already renowned as a chef at the time, and he owned a lakeside restaurant by 1860 which he called Crum's House. Regis Paper Company which manufactured packaging for chips, claiming that Crum's customer was Cornelius Vanderbilt. A version of this story was popularized in a 1973 national advertising campaign by St. They soon came to be called 'Saratoga Chips', a name that persisted into the mid-twentieth century. To his surprise, the customer loved them. Frustrated, Crum sliced several potatoes extremely thin, fried them to a crisp, and seasoned them with extra salt. The customer kept sending back his French-fried potatoes, complaining that they were too thick, too 'soggy', or not salted enough. By the late nineteenth century, a popular version of the story attributed the dish to George Crum, a cook at Moon's Lake House who was trying to appease an unhappy customer on August 24, 1853. Ī legend associates the creation of potato chips with Saratoga Springs, New York, decades later than the first recorded recipe. Lee's Cook's Own Book (1832), both of which explicitly cite Kitchiner. Early recipes for potato chips in the US are found in Mary Randolph's Virginia House-Wife (1824) and in N.K.M. An 1825 British book about French cookery calls them 'Pommes de Terre frites' (second recipe) and calls for thin slices of potato fried in 'clarified butter or goose dripping', drained and sprinkled with salt. cut them in shavings round and round, as you would peel a lemon dry them well in a clean cloth, and fry them in lard or dripping'. The 1822 edition's recipe for 'Potatoes fried in Slices or Shavings' reads 'peel large potatoes. The earliest known recipe for something similar to today's potato chips is in William Kitchiner's book The Cook's Oracle published in 1817, which was a bestseller in the United Kingdom and the United States.

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