Potatoes for Chips

As a world food, potatoes are second in human consumption only to rice. 

The potato chip, a thin slice of potato fried in oil or baked in an oven until crisp, may be salted or flavoured after cooking. And as thin, salted, crisp chips, they are the world's favourite snack food. Potato chips originated in New England, USA as one man's variation to the French-fried potato, and their production was the result not of a sudden stroke of the culinary invention but of a fit of pique!

Chips as a business for several decades after their creation, potato chips were largely a dinner dish. In the 1920s, Herman Lay, a traveling salesman in the South, helped popularize the food from Atlanta to Tennessee. Lay peddled potato chips to Southern grocers out of the trunk of his car, building a business and a name that would become synonymous with the thin, salty snack. Lay's potato chips became the first successfully marketed national brand, and in 1961 Herman Lay, to increase his line of goods merged his company with Frito, the Dallas-based producer of such snack foods as Fritos Corn Chips.

Origin

In the summer of 1853, Native American George Crum was employed as a chef at an elegant resort in Saratoga Springs, New York. On Moon Lake Lodge’s restaurant menu were French-fried potatoes, prepared by Crum in the standard, thick-cut French style that was popularized in France in the 1700s and enjoyed by Thomas Jefferson as ambassador to that country. Ever since Jefferson brought the recipe to America and served French fries to guests at Monticello, the dish was popular and serious dinner fare.