So there's a story going around on the internet that says potato chips were invented
near Saratoga Springs New York in 1853.
It's even on the website of this Smithsonian so it's got to be true, right?
Wrong! And I am going to prove it by making
a recipe for potato chips from 1817,
36 years before the story took place.
The history, both fake and real, of the potato chip
this time on Tasting History.
So the recipe that I'm working from today to dispel the spirous claim
that the potato chip was invented in 1853
comes from 'The Cook's Oracle' an 1817 English Cookbook by Dr William Kitchiner.
Now the American term chip, nor the British term crisp had come into common use yet so he calls them
"Potatoes fried in slices or shavings. Peel large potatoes, slice them about a quarter of an inch thick,
or 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, take care that your fat and frying pan are quite clean;
put it on a quick fire watch it and as soon as the lard boils and is still,
put in the slices of potato and keep moving them till they are crisp; take them up and lay them to drain on a sieve;
send them up with very little salt sprinkled over them."
So he says they should be about a quarter of an inch thick which is a lot thicker than you would make
a potato chip today but nowhere near as thick as you would make like a french fry
or what they would call a chip in England.
Another way that they're different from french fries is he says they should be crisp and french fries aren't usually crisp
especially if you're in England, frankly they make soggy fries.
So I'm curious is this the origin of the English term crisp meaning potato chip.
I don't know either way I am going to make these a quarter of an inch thick
and an 1/8 inch thick which is what later recipes call for from the mid to late 19th century.
So for this recipe all you need is a few potatoes, about a pound,
and you want to use either rusted potatoes or any high starch potato that's going to work best for this.
And then about 2 quarts of lard, you can use any kind of oil he mentions lard but you can use a different type of oil if you would prefer
but lard tastes great so that's what I'm using.
Then just a bit of salt.
So first peel the potatoes and then slice them.
You can use a knife for this but you want them to be very, very even so I'm going to be using a mandolin slicer.
One, because that's frankly the best way to slice potatoes evenly
and two, it is something that they would would have had available at the time.
In fact similar tools appear as far back as the 'Opera di Bartolomeo Scappi',
and by the 18th century they were pretty much what we use today.
And there's actually some fake history about the mandolin slicer also circulating around the internet.
On some sites you will find claims that it was invented by Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin
famous for another slicing device, the guillotine.
And it would be really, really cool if that was true when I first read that I was like oh let this actually be a thing
but turns out it's not, or at least there is no evidence to suggest that it is so oh well.
Now this recipe is very simple, it says that you just slice the potatoes, and then dry them and fry them there is no mention of
washing them or putting them in any kind of solution that will strip away some of the starch
which is the common method that is used today,
because it's going to allow you to leave them in the fryer longer before they get dark
but he doesn't say to do that so I'm not doing that.
So all I'm doing is slicing the potatoes and then drying them well and then heating up my fat.
Now whatever fat you're using you want to bring it up to around 365° F or 185° Celsius
before adding your potatoes. Once you've added the potatoes they're going to bubble all about,
and the temperature of the oil is going to drop considerably but that is okay.
We actually want it to drop to between 240° and 250° Fahrenheit
and that's actually where you want to keep it for most of the frying.
And depending on the width of the potato slice, is going to depend on how long you need to fry it.
They're really, really thin. 5 to 7 minutes is fine.
My quarter of an inch thick potatoes though, they needed about 15 minutes at that temperature.
And the thing is you kind of have to do this a little bit to know when they're done.
A lot of the bubbles will stop bubbling, but there still will be some and it will start to darken
but you got to kind of find that sweet spot.
Also in 1817 they wouldn't have had thermometers so- that too, just telling the temperature of the fat
that too would have had to been done just by doing it, trial and error baby.
Now while they fry the recipe says to keep moving them around.
It doesn't need to be constant but this will keep them from sticking and will allow them to fry more evenly.
Now after they've had some time in that 240 to 250 F range
you can raise the temperature up to close to 300 but don't go over 300 F.
Then keep it there for about the last 5 minutes. This will help them really crisp up and get a little bit darker.
And he says that they're ready once they are crisp. It is kind of hard to tell when they are crisp
but by stirring them around you'll start to kind of feel the potato, and once they're not given any give then they're crisp.
Then take them out and set them on a large flat sieve like the recipe says,
or you can just use some paper towel laid over a cooling rack.
Essentially all you're trying to do is let any excess grease drain.
After a minute or so sprinkle with a bit of salt and to them and let them cool to room temperature, and while they cool
make sure you are SUBSCRIBED to Tasting History as we look at the fake history of potato chips.
Saratoga Lake, New York 1853
it all took place at Moon's Lake House a fine, fine establishment
serving high quality victuals to the mucky mucks come up from New York City.
Now the restaurant itself was owned by a Mr. Carey Moon
but all the cooking was done by by Catherine Wicks affectionately known as Aunt Cate,
and her brother George Speck Crum.
So one version of the story goes that George is back in the kitchen when a well-to-do customer,
sometimes the customer is Cornelius Vanderbilt in some versions, but a well-to-do customer comes in,
and orders some fried potatoes which were on the menu.
George fries up the potatoes, sends them out and the customer says no,
they need to be thinner like I had in France, ooh la la.
So George slices them thinner sends them out again,
and once again nope, not thin enough.
Well this goes on several times, depending on who's telling the tale, until finally George fed up with this difficult customer
slices the potatoes so thin that you could even see through them, wafer thin.
Then he fries them up, salts them and sends them out to the customer
assuming that the customer would be embarrassed or upset at how silly these thin potatoes were.
Well the customer loved them and ate the whole basket or plate or whatever they were served on just
polished them off and thus born was the potato chip.
The first problem with this story is that as evidenced by the recipe that we're making today
they already existed, both in an English cookbook and in several American cookbooks
like 'The Virginia Housewife' from 1824 though that one pretty much just copied word for word the English recipe
so do with that what you will.
Also there are so many variations on this story, who the customer was,
exactly when it was, even who was doing the cooking, because sometimes it was Aunt Cate his sister
who sometimes is also his sister-in-law, it's a absolute mess.
Anyway there's so much variation that it's hard to actually say what happened.
Also, the first time that any of this seemed to have been
talked about or written down wasn't until 30 years after it supposedly took place.
This is how fake history gets spread around, all of the internet, in published publications.
Of course it's published, it's publication.
Anyway it gets spread around and so you just got to always kind of find those original sources and if you can't find them
well maybe something's amiss.
But even though the story as was told probably never happened
there is some truth to it because George Crum who was very much a real person
was a very respected chef and later owned his own restaurant near Saratoga Springs,
and he probably is the person to have either
first made potato chips very, very thin or at least he's the first person to have popularized them.
This very thin style of chip became known as Saratoga chips.
In 1883 Jessup Whitehead wrote in 'The Chicago Herald Cooking School'
that "Potatoes sliced thick are not Saratogas. Though generally so called.
The true chips are as thin as paper and curl up when fried.
They are used cold as well as hot, and may be prepared before wanted and kept a considerable time."
And by the end of the 19th century this style of chip was very much associated with George Crum and his restaurant.
"Not to dine at Crum's, at the Lake, is to be out of the world and out of the fashion.
Crum has owned the place for ten years and has made a big success of it,
and there first appeared to a waiting, hungry world
the delectable morsels known as Saratoga chips."
These Saratoga chips were incredibly popular and by the late 19th century
there were recipes in many, many American cookbooks for them,
and they were actually selling Saratoga chip slicers specially designed for slicing Saratoga chips
except that they weren't. They were actually just regular potato slicers
but they would say that they were specially designed for Saratoga chips because it sold more slicers.
Then in 1895 William Tappenden of Ohio began boxing up the chips,
and selling them to stores.
The only problem with that is that the chips would go stale rather quickly.
The meerest bit of humidity and the chips are no longer crisp.
Now the solution to that came in 1926
when a California woman named Laura Scudder, famous now for her peanut butter,
she debuted a bag of wax paper that could be filled with chips,
and then sealed. She even put a date of not expiration, but of freshness
on the bag letting you know how long they would be nice and crisp.
And she marketed them as Laura Scudders Potato Chips "the noisiest chips in the world."
And around this time across the pond in England where instead of chips they had taken on the name crisps.
The Smith's Potato Crisps Company began selling the chips
in grease-proof paper bags all over London.
And with the bag of potato chips came a little sachet of salt so you could flavor the chips yourself.
And that pretty much was the only flavor added to potato chips for for the longest time,
and it would take someone who really understood potatoes
to take the chip to the next level in flavor, and of course
it would take an Irishman to do so.
In 1954 a man named Seamus Burke was working for the Tato Irish Crisp Company,
and under the direction of the owner Joe "Spud" Murphy they debuted a cheese and onion flavored chip.
They took off and became wildly popular, other companies
started getting in on the game. Very soon the flavor was followed by salt and vinegar,
but in America it was actually sour cream and onion and barbeque that became popular.
Now the main issue with these crisps, or chips, was that in the bag they were so thin
that they would often break up and so you'd open the bag and really there'd just be a bunch of crumbs,
and then two companies decided to address this issue.
The first was in the 1950s with the corrugated potato chip
better known today as Ruffles.
Ruffles have ridges.
Does anyone else remember those commercials, think it was like late ' 80s early '90s.
I'm dating myself.
Well it's because of those ridges that the chips had more structural integrity and so were less prone to breakage.
The other solution came in 1956 when a chemist from Proctor and Gamble
decided to come up with a chip that was
uniform in shape, a saddle-shaped chip that could then be stacked
and put in a cylinder and sealed.
The only issue was that the process of making this uniform chip
was that it tasted terrible.
And so it didn't go anywhere for quite some time.
Took about a decade for them to revisit this idea and when they did they
retooled the recipe and came up with Pringles newfangled potato chips.
But really they weren't potato chips because they were actually made of a potato based dough that was then molded
into the shape of chips and so the other big chip companies got together,
and put the squeeze on them or instead they called the FDA and the FDA said
yeah actually we need you to call them "potato chips made from dried potatoes".
Well that isn't very catchy and probably wouldn't even fit on the can
so they decided to to follow the British lead and call them potato crisps instead,
though most people today just call them Pringles.
Now there was one other way that they stopped chips from breaking up in the bag
and that was to add air to the bag which is why now when you open a bag of chips
it's only like a third full and that just makes me frustrated
so I don't quite understand why they didn't just start making them thicker
like the ones today that I'm making,
but it turns out that they did, because kettle chips started to come back
in the 80s and '90s
and they are thicker and made by
taking the potatoes and putting them into a kettle of oil and frying them,
and they don't break as easily.
So even though they do take quite a bit longer to fry
I am looking forward to my unbreakable potato chips from 1817,
and here we are the first recipe for potato chips.
All right so I've got the 1/4 inch thick and the 1/8 of an inch thick. Honestly
not a huge difference in how thick they are it looks like.
These curled up a little bit more the eighth of an inch thick ones,
and according to two sources from the 19th century the thinner they are the more they will curl.
But the color is pretty uniform.
Let's start with that 1/4 inch thick.
[crunch]
Crunchy!
I'm actually kinda surprised.
Hm!
So I got to say the flavor is
so superior to a regular potato chip, and I love potato chips but
you just get so much more potato.
It really tastes like just
mashed potatoes and lard,
essentially that's what it is but
really, really good. And they're not greasy I thought they would be because
of the thickness, that they would kind of absorb it but
let's try the thinner one, eighth of an inch.
Here we go.
[crunch]
[munch munch]
Even crunchier and maybe a better flavor. There's almost a hint of-
it's not burning. It's-
It's that maillard reaction that kind of gives that that really savoriness to it,
and kind of elevates the flavor so it's not just potato and oil,
it's a new flavor, but again
this is a lot more flavorful than than your average potato chip that you would get today.
Maybe that's why kettle chips have really made a comeback because they do taste better.
The only problem with kettle chips
is that because they're more sturdy and they don't break as easily,
they always cut the inside of my mouth, like the roof of my mouth.
I'll eat a bag of kettle chips and regret it for the next 48 hours
but while I'm doing it I'm very, very happy.
So since we talked about some fake history here on the show today
I wanted to show you this book.
It is called 'Fake History 101 Things That Never Happened'
by the Fake History Hunter on Twitter.
I follow her, she's fantastic. She's always talking about like
picking fights with people who are posting fake history online.
She's great and in this not only does she attack some of the most
common fake history memes and and things that are floating around on the internet but then she goes in
and debunks it and tells you why it's debunked, and what are the original sources,
where are the original sources if there are none, you know.
She really does her research, it's fascinating and she tells you how you can approach fake history as well.
If it's not in this book then you can kind of debunk things on your own,
or confirm them because there's a lot of real history out there as well.
So yeah! Try the book, try the chips and I will see you next time on Tasting History.