![]() ![]() Thomas was widely credited as “the inventor of Saratoga chips.” A prominent Black hotelier referred to in one obituary as “next to Booker T. In another telling, she accidentally dropped a thin slice into a boiling pot of fat while peeling potatoes retrieved it with a fork, and had her eureka moment.Ĭrum and Wicks weren’t the only posthumous claimants to the title. In one variation of the disgruntled diner story, it is she, not Crum, who carved potatoes paper-thin in a moment of pique. Three years later, an obituary for Catherine Adkins Wicks, age 103, maintained that she, in fact, “was said to be the originator of the potato chip.” Wicks, who was Crum’s sister, worked alongside him in the kitchen and was familiarly known as Aunt Kate or Aunt Katie. Most of his obituaries, in 1914, don’t mention the potato chip at all, and those that do simply say that he was “said to have” invented it. In 1889, a writer in the New York Herald called him “the best cook in the country,” with nary a word about potatoes. and celebrated for his brook trout, lake bass, woodcock and partridge, among other dishes-making him perhaps the first celebrity chef in America. Stiles concluded in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt.įor another, Crum’s supposed role in inventing the potato chip seems to have gone largely unrecognized in his lifetime, even though he was widely known across the U.S. “There is no truth to the tale,” historian T.J. For one, if there was a disgruntled diner, it almost certainly wasn’t Vanderbilt. Unfortunately, there are several problems with the Crum story. ![]() This version of events eventually became so well-established that, in 1976, American Heritage magazine would dub Crum, also known as George Speck, the “Edison of Grease.” To Crum’s surprise, Vanderbilt loved them, and the potato chip was born. George Crum, a famed chef of Native American and Black heritage, took umbrage at the request and, in an “I’ll show him!” mood, sliced some potatoes as thin as he could, fried them to a crisp and served them to Vanderbilt. Disappointed by the fried potatoes he’d been served, he sent them back to the kitchen, asking for more thinly sliced ones. The most popular potato chip legend goes like this: One day in 1853, the shipping and railroad baron Cornelius Vanderbilt was dining at Moon’s Lake House.
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