Kettle cooked
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| Alternative names | Potato crisps |
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| Course | Snack, side dish |
| Place of origin | England, 1817 |
| Serving temperature | Room temperature |
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A potato chip (American English) or crisp (British English) is a thin slice of potato that has been deep fried or baked until crunchy. Potato chips are commonly served as a snack, side dish, or appetizer. The basic chips are cooked and salted; additional varieties are manufactured using various flavorings and ingredients including herbs, spices, cheeses, other natural flavors, artificial flavors and additives.
Potato chips are a predominant part of the snack food and convenience food market in Western countries. The global potato chip market generated total revenues of US$16.49 billion in 2005. This accounted for 35.5% of the total savory snacks market in that year ($46.1 billion).
The earliest known recipe for potato chips is in William Kitchiner's cookbook The Cook's Oracle, first published in 1817, which was a bestseller in England and the United States. The 1822 edition's version of recipe 104 is called "Potatoes fried in Slices or Shavings" and reads "peel large potatoes, slice them about a quarter of an inch thick, or 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". Early recipes for potato chips in the United States 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.
However, a legend associates the creation of potato chips with Saratoga Springs, New York, decades later. By the late nineteenth century, a popular version of the story attributed the dish to George Crum, a half-black, half-Native American cook at Moon's Lake House, who was trying to appease an unhappy customer on 24 August 1853. The customer kept sending his French-fried potatoes back, complaining that they were too thick. Frustrated, he sliced the potatoes razor thin, fried them until crisp and seasoned them with extra salt. To Crum's surprise, the customer loved them. They soon became called "Saratoga Chips", a name that persisted into at least the mid-twentieth century. A version of this story popularized in a 1973 national advertising campaign by St. Regis Paper Company, which manufactured packaging for chips, said that Crum's customer was Cornelius Vanderbilt. Crum was renowned as a chef and by 1860 owned his own lakeside restaurant, Crum's House.
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