The potato chip (puhleez don’t say iconic) is a symbol of portable snacks, specifically the category the food industry calls salty snacks. American companies turn four million tons of potatoes into chips every year. That’s $10 billion of what most Americans consider to be three of the five basic food groups: fat, starch, and salt. Sugar and refined corn syrup are the others. Americans eat two billion pounds of potato chips a year and three out of four Americans are overweight. This is no coincidence. On average, Americans eat nearly seven pounds of potato chips per person per year. Someone’s eating 14 pounds because I don’t eat them any more.
Did Someone Invent the Potato Chip – or Was It an Accident?
Many claim the guy who invented the potato chip was named George Speck, no relation to serial killer Richard. Idle speculators like to say he may have been of Native American and/or Negro (period correct) descent, but who cares? He changed his name to Crum because, he said, “A crum(b) is bigger than a speck.”
The most popular story going around is the one where some big shot fat cat jerk customer made a scene in a Saratoga Springs restaurant
He sent his fried potatoes back to the kitchen where Crum worked because they were badly undercooked. I don’t know how many chefs you know, but telling them their baby is ugly is a poor strategy and so is scolding the waiter*
Anyway, Crum grumbled something about Not crisp enough! I’ll show that sonofabitch crisp! And he did. He sliced the potatoes thinner than he ever had before and left them in the boiling grease until they began to burn at the edges.
I see the unnamed diner as Sidney Greenstreet’s Kasper Gutman in The Maltese Falcon
Marvelous!, said the Fat Man. Wonderful! I insist that you always make these for me just like this. Word got around about the menu influencer when other diners who were there that day told their tales. And just like that, Crum’s new menu item went viral and the world had its first potato chip. A great story, but not true.
The story is further embellished
One story has a juvenile Crum selling sold cold drinks from a homemade stand in front of his family’s home in 1909. Another has him hawking peanuts up and down the aisles at the Greenville, South Carolina, Spinners minor league baseball games. As an adult, there’s a story the Nashville snack food entrepreneur bought a potato chip factory. Still another says he bought a potato chip delivery route.
Smithsonian says Crum wasn’t the first potato chip maker
Their story is that a recipe for fried potato slices and shavings (crisps) appeared in an English cookbook nearly 100 years earlier. Crum is posthumously given credit for popularizing the potato chips invented by someone else. This is why you may hear him referred to as the
MSN.com says it was Crum’s sister Catherine who invented the potato chip
It had nothing to do with too-thick fries or Cornelius Vanderbilt. She accidentally dropped a potato in the deep-fat fryer she was dunking her doughnut dough in. The Crum story was adopted by a snack food trade association that made up the marketing story they wanted to tell.
A man named Tappendale was selling his homemade potato chips to nearby grocery stores
The chips were sold from large open barrels in bulk in 1895 – no individual packaging. It’s not hard to imagine that most of the potato chips in the barrel were soon stale and broken into bits.
Laura Scudder sold her chips in bags made of waxed paper
Employees sealed the bags so they were airtight, keeping them fresher longer. You know the rest; Herman Lay cooked, packaged, and marketed his potato chips that became the national bestseller carrying his name.
Dozens of competing potato chip companies bought and sold each other until we finally arrived at Frito-Lay, the corn chip-potato chip company.
Fritos are corn chips. Unlike tortillas, fritos are made of cornmeal, then deep-fried. In Spanish, the word frito means fried, making it the name of the process. Frito pies are known as walking tacos because chili, cheese, onions, jalapeños, and other ingredients are added to a bag of Fritos corn chips.
These walking tacos remind me of how Coca-Cola was sold on the streets in Saigon in 1969
The empty glass bottles were valuable, so the vendor open a bottle of Coke and poured it into a baggie along with ice cubes. The vendor inserted a straw and then wrapped it with a rubber band. We’d walk along the street with bags of cola lying in the palms of our hands, a strange feeling.
Frito was the company with a spokescartooncharacter the Frito Bandito
That’s not a typo. Bandido is the word in Spanish, but bandito rhymes with Frito. The bandit looked like that guy who said “Badges? We don’t need no stinking badges,” but cleaned up and with better teeth. The Mexican Bandit character wore the stereotype giant sombrero and criss-crossed bullet straps. Yes, I know they’re bandoliers, but the youngsters never saw the Cisco Kid and his sidekick Pancho. Mel Blanc (Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam, and Speedy Gonzales, subject of a 1962 Pat Boone song, Speedy Gonzales).
The Cisco Kid was a Robin Hood type, along the same lines as Zorro and the Lone Ranger
All were heroic characters without any visible means of support, the legal definition of vagrants. They spent their days riding around busting up murderous gangs, fighting corruption, looking for towns to save, chicas to rescue, and doling out justice wherever it was needed.
Not many people know that the actor who played Cisco Kid, a Mexican, was really a Romanian
Duncan Renaldo’s real name was Vasile Dumitru Cughieaneas, which doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue outside of Romania.
The Kid and Pancho rode horses named Diablo (devil) and Loco (crazy). Their stock closing to each week’s episode was “Ohhh, Pancho!” “Ohhh, Cisco!” heavily-accented, of course.
Prior to television, the Cisco Kid was a popular radio and film character. Before that, the Cisco Kid was a character in The Caballero’s Way, a story written by O. Henry.
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* Waiters was long the period correct term in the days before wait staff and servers. Regular readers already know I won’t play pronoun games or try to keep up with the ever-changing lists of what someone someone claims is the right way to speak and think. Nor will I refer to a single individual as them/they/their. Enough of that.
I often insert the phrase (period correct) in a story. This is one way of letting people know that I deliberately pass on sanitizing old words to new standards. I wrote about this seven years ago in A Closer Look at Bowdlerizing.
Bonus
H.W. Lay’s company is said to have been the first snack food company to advertise on television: You may recall their slogan, “Betcha can’t eat just one.” Check out this tv ad with Bert Lahr, the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz.
