When it comes to the crunch, we've loved crisps for 200 years

And an antique cookbook containing perhaps the earliest recipe for the salty snacks proves it... but how do these vintage fried potato slices compare to their modern cousins?

- Dominic Bliss

WE British just can’t resist a crisp or two – happily munching our way through a staggering six billion packets or so every year. And, as the discovery of a rare 19th-century recipe book has revealed, we’ve loved these salty snacks for at least two centuries.

Later this week a London auction house is selling an original copy of Cook’s Oracle, dating from 1817 and written by William Kitchiner, a famous chef from the Georgian era.

Discovered in a private collection, the book includes a recipe for sliced potatoes, fried in lard and served with a little salt.

Although vastly higher in calories, they aren’t totally alien to the modern-day crisps you find in a packet of Walkers or McCoy’s.

Also an amateur musician and an optician, Kitchiner – who died in 1827 aged 51 or 52 – was an early example of a celebrity chef, his cookbook a bestseller in both Britain and America.

His book also contains no fewer than 11 ketchup recipes, with flavours such as oyster, cockle, mussel and mushroom. The first-edition copy is being sold by an anonymous collector through Forum Auctions with a guide price of £600.

“The present work contains one of the earliest recipes for what we now know as crisps,” explains Justin Phillips of the auction house. “Perhaps it could even be the genesis of the crisp, which is a British institution.”