Potato chips (North American and Australian English; often just chips) or crisps (British and Irish English) are thin slices of potato (or a thin deposit of potato paste) that have been deep-fried, baked, or air-fried until crunchy. They are commonly served as a snack, appetizer or side dish. Basic potato chips are cooked and salted; additional varieties are manufactured using various seasonings, flavorings and ingredients including herbs, spices, cheeses, other natural flavors, artificial flavors, and additives. Potato chips form a large part of the snack food and convenience food market in Western countries. The global potato chip market generated total revenue of US$16.49 billion in 2005. This accounted for 35.5% of the total savory snacks market in that year (which was $46.1 billion overall).
History The earliest known recipe for potato chips is in the English cook William Kitchiner's book The Cook's Oracle published in 1817 in London, which was a bestseller in the United Kingdom and the United States. The 1822 edition's recipe for "Potatoes fried in Slices or Shavings" reads "peel large potatoes... 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". 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", to be drained once crisp and sprinkled with salt. Later recipes for potato chips in the US are found in Mary Randolph's Virginia House-Wife (1824) and in N.K.M. Lee's Cook's Own Book (1832), both of which explicitly cite Kitchiner. A popular legend associates the creation of potato chips with Saratoga Springs, New York, decades after the first recorded recipe. By the late nineteenth century, a popular version of the story, today known to be untrue, attributed the creation of potato chips to George Crum, a cook at Moon's Lake House who was trying to appease an unhappy customer on August 24, 1853. The customer kept sending back his French-fried potatoes, complaining that they were too thick, too "soggy", or not salted enough. Frustrated, Crum sliced several potatoes extremely thin, fried them to a crisp, and seasoned them with extra salt – to his surprise, the customer loved them. They soon came to be called "Saratoga Chips", a name that persisted into the mid-twentieth century. A version of this story was popularized in a 1973 national advertising campaign by St. Regis Paper Company which manufactured packaging for chips, claiming that Crum's customer was Cornelius Vanderbilt. The story is today known to be a myth, and historians and academics have identified a number of problems with the story: Vanderbilt was in Europe during the alleged encounter, the Moons didn't purchase the Lake House until 1854, and crispy fried potatoes were not unknown to Saratoga in 1853. However, the story remains frequently cited in popular media.
Production
In the 20th century, potato chips spread beyond chef-cooked restaurant fare and began to be mass-produced for home consumption. The Dayton, Ohio-based Mikesell's Potato Chip Company, founded in 1910, identifies as the "oldest potato chip company in the United States". New Hampshire-based Granite State Potato Chip Factory, founded in 1905 and in operation until 2007, was one of America's first potato chip manufacturers.
Flavoring
In an idea originated by the Smiths Potato Crisps Company Ltd, formed in 1920, Frank Smith packaged his chips in greaseproof paper bags and attached a twist of salt, and sold them around London. The potato chip remained otherwise unseasoned until the 1950s. After some trial and error, in 1954, Joe "Spud" Murphy, the owner of the Irish crisps company Tayto, and his employee Seamus Burke, produced the world's first seasoned chips: cheese & onion. Companies worldwide sought to buy the rights to Tayto's technique. Walkers of Leicester, England, produced cheese & onion the same year. Golden Wonder (Smith's main competitor at the time) also started to produce cheese & onion, and Smith's countered with salt & vinegar (tested first by their north-east England subsidiary Tudor and then launched nationally in 1967), starting a two-decade-long flavor war. The first flavored chips in the United States, barbecue flavor, are also traced to 1954. In 1958, Herr's was the first company to introduce barbecue-flavored potato chips in Pennsylvania.
Packaging In the 1920s, Laura Scudder, an entrepreneur in Monterey Park, California, started having her workers take home sheets of wax paper to iron into the form of bags, which were filled with chips at her factory the next day. This pioneering method reduced crumbling and kept the chips fresh and crisp longer. This innovation, along with the invention of cellophane, allowed potato chips to become a mass-market product.
Kettle-cooked chips
Chips were long made in a batch process, where the potato slices are rinsed with cold water to release starch, fried at a low temperature of 300 °F (150 °C), and continuously raked to prevent them from sticking together. Industrial advances resulted in a shift to production by a continuous process, running the chips through a vat of hot oil and drying them in a conveyor process. Some small producers continued to use a batch process, notably in Maui. In 1980, inspired by the Maui Chip, an entrepreneur started Cape Cod Potato Chips to produce thicker, batch-cooked "Hawaiian style" potato chips, which came to be known as kettle-style (US) or hand-cooked (UK) chips and became a premium, "gourmet" item. Kettle chips are thicker and the surface starch is not rinsed off, resulting in a style of chip called "hard-bite".
Nomenclature
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