The first potato chips were cooked by Chef George Crumb at the Moon Lake Lodge in 1853 when, the culinary legend says, Cornelius Vanderbilt returned an order of French fries to the kitchen because he thought they were cut too thick. To spite Vanderbilt, Crumb sliced a potato wafer-thin—too thin to be spearable by a fork—and fried the discs. When he sent them into the dining room, instead of getting angry at the sight of see-through slender, brittle spuds, Vanderbilt was delighted. He threw down his fork and ate the fried chips of potato with his hands. A snack food was born, named Saratoga chips for the New York resort town in which the invention took place.
For a good while, they were known only among people in the Northeast, served at the home dinner table to accompany meat or fish and then by seafood restaurants as a companion for raw clams and oysters. It wasn’t until the 1920s that they began getting popular in other regions; and by the end of the next decade, as James Beard later recalled, “the ghastly potato-chip-dip invention had . . . begun to spread across the country.” After World War II, potato chips’ popularity soared because they were so handy for suburban-style casual entertaining in rec rooms or on patios, at teen parties, and—most important of all—as the munchable best-suited for television-watching. Furthermore, the very shape of potato chips seemed to match the era’s adoration of things with swoopy curves. Populuxe, Thomas Hines’s imaginative exegesis of the golden age of American materialism, observed “The potato chip, with its free-form shape and double curving plane, recalled some of the high-design objects of the day—Danish coffee tables and American molded fiberglass and bent plywood chairs. Formally, it is a very short jump from the standard potato chip to the great double-curving furniture of Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen.”
The great date in the ascent of the potato chip to supremacy among snack foods is 1954, when California dip was invented—a stroke of simple genius, requiring minimal preparation and no utensils for eating. However, California dip and the hundreds of other hot and cold dunks popularized as party food in the fifties tended to be weighty compounds. Ordinary chips frequently broke when plowed into them or, worse, on the way from serving dish to mouth. The solution was the corrugated chip, known by such brand names as Ridgies, Ruffles, and Dipsy Doodles—all strong enough to dig through even claylike, day-old dip without cracking.
Potato chips are a snack food that has gotten better in recent years.
As Americans settled down at their televisions to watch Super Bowls and miniseries in the 1970s, many grew accustomed to bleached-white chips with scarcely a hint of potato flavor, enjoying them for their high salt and fat content. Following the lead of Pringles, a mass-produced chip of uniform size and shape that is sold stacked in a can, chip purveyors marketed “potato snack chips” reconstituted from dried potatoes and potato starch, a process that eliminates the inconveniences of actually slicing and frying potatoes (real spuds stick together; they vary wildly in color depending on the sugar content, which changes from season to season).
Sales of bland-tasting, blemish-free chips have never faltered, but at the same time, potato chip connoisseurship has thrived, too. America’s myriad regional brands continue to have devotees who treasure their real potato look (mottled, irregularly shaped), their distinctive feel (thicker, brittle, and more fragile), and their actual potato taste. Since the beginning of chip history, small companies have remained an important part of the landscape, supplying local taste with the likes of superspicy Voodoo chips from Zapp’s in Cajun country and Luau Barbecue chips from Tim’s of Seattle.
Potato chips’ new age of excellence began in 1980, when Cape Cod began nationally marketing what it called kettle-style chips: sliced thicker than ordinary chips, crunchier, and with a real potato flavor. Kettle chips, which cost more than ordinary ones, are made by hand rather than by the ton on conveyor belts. The best of them, which probably taste something like the original Saratogas, are made in small batches, and the best of the best—the unbearably addictive ones—are still fried in lard and are still salty as hell.