The flavour has chipped away

Potato chips used to be a thing of joy. Now, they're mass-produced in factories, the flavours seem artificial and, like so much else, the good stuff is branded as gourmet

- VIR SANGHVI

It is the taste of my childhood. And it has many different names. When I was young, the thinly sliced deep-fried potatoes I love came from shops with names like Okay Wafers, because wafers was what we called them. And they were crisp, golden and actually tasted of potatoes.

I never found any fresh wafers, let alone wafer shops, when I went to school in England but there was no shortage of industrially manufactured, pre-packaged crisps – which was what they called wafers. They never seemed quite right but you could buy them in different flavours, which tasted just enough of the ingredients they were mimicking to give a jolt to the palate.

This was before I discovered the range of wafers/crisps in America. Everywhere I went I came across new brands, many of which were local. Except they called them potato chips.

I never got used to calling wafers “chips”. And when I started writing about food, nobody called them wafers. But I discovered that crisps (let’s call them that for the rest of this article) were a universal craze.

There was a story about their invention by an American called George Crumb, but the more I read the dodgier that claim seemed.

In her definitive study of crisps, British journalist Natalie Whittle writes about a talk by the Spanish chef Ferran Adria. “Who invented the omelette?” he asked his audience. Nobody had an answer. Some dishes, he said, have no specific origin, they just emerge from our consciousness.