How Potato Chips Invented By George Crum | Today In History | History Today | World History Today
Channel: History Continued
Date: 25/08/2021

24th August 1853, First potato chips prepared by chef George Crum at Moon's Lake House, near Saratoga Springs, New York.

George Speck also known as George Crum; was an American chef. He worked as a hunter, guide, and cook in the Adirondack Mountains, and became noted for his culinary skills after being hired at Moon’s Lake House on Saratoga Lake, near Saratoga Springs, New York. Speck's specialities included wild meat, especially venison and duck, and he often experimented in the kitchen. During the 1850s, while working at Moon's Lake House in the midst of a dinner rush, Speck tried slicing the potatoes extra thin and dropping the slices into the deep hot fat of the frying pan. Although recipes for potato chips were published in several cookbooks decades prior to the 1850s, a local legend associates Speck with the creation of potato chip.

By 1860, Speck had opened his own restaurant, called Crum's, on Storey Hill in nearby Malta, New York. His cuisine was in high demand among Saratoga Springs' tourists and elites: "His prices were; those of the fashionable New York restaurants, but his food and service were worth it…Everything possible was raised on his own small farm, and that, too, got his personal attention whenever he could arrange it." According to popular accounts, he was said to include a basket of chips on every table. Guests were obliged to wait their turn, the millionaire as well as the wage-earner. Mr. Vanderbilt once was obliged to wait an hour and a half for a meal; With none but rich pleasure-seekers as his guests, Speck kept his tables laden with the best of everything, and for it all charged Delmonico prices.

Wicks recalled the invention of Saratoga Chips as an accident: she had "chipped off a piece of the potato which, by the merest accident, fell into the pan of fat. She fished it out with a fork and set it down upon a plate beside her on the table." Her brother tasted it, declared it good, and said, "We’ll have plenty of these." In a 1932 interview with the Saratogian newspaper, her grandson, John Gilbert Freeman, asserted Wicks's role as the true inventor of the potato chip.

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