How the Potato Chip was Popularized
Potato chips, known as America's number 1 favorite snack item. Packed in more lunches world wide and as the commercial line says you can't eat just one. In 2003, over 65,000 people were employed making potato chips. With retail sales of over 6 million dollars per year, chips have come a long way from their humble beginnings.(2)
In the summer of 1853, George Crum was employed as a chef in Saratoga Springs, New York. He invented them by mistake in 1853 when a picky dinner guest kept complaing about the fries being too thick. After a few failed attempts at making the perfect fries for the dinner guest, Crum made an extremely thin fry too thin to be skewered by a fork. The plan backfired. The dinner guest loved the thin fries and other diners began requesting Crum's potato
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They were at first called Saratoga chips. Potatoes are currently second in human consumption only to rice. As thin, salted, crisp chips, they are America's favorite snack food, and were made as a fit of pique rather than a stroke of culinary invention. The invention of the potato peeler in 1920 helped make potato chips a marketable item, as the work of preparing became much easier.(1)
Today, the potato chips we eat are in plastic bags because we wanted to keep the chips crispy and fresh for as long as possible, and we wanted to make them portable so we could have them as a snack rather than having to go to a diner and have them as lunch or dinner.(3)
In 1921, Bill and Sallie Utz began making and delivering potato chips, with Sallie making them and Bill delivering. They made the Hanover Home Brand Potato Chips in Hanover, Pennsylvania. Sallie Utz used her cooking knowledge to make the chips in a mini Summer house behind their home. The equipment Sallie used made roughly 50 pounds of potato chips per hour. While Sallie stayed home to make chips, Bill delivered them to "mom and pop"