It must have been an Irishman that invented what we call today, the “Potato Chip,” right? While you reach for that bag of potato chips, have you ever wondered who was the first one to come up with the idea of slicing potatoes thinly and then deep frying them?

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Depending on where you are from, there can be a bit of confusion with regard to term “chip” as applied to a potato product. In the UK and other places, “Fish and Chips” generally refers to a deep fried dinner of battered fish and thick sliced potatoes. In other parts of the world, those thick sliced pieces of potato after they’ve been deep fried are referred to as “French Fries.”

It was possibly Thomas Jefferson and some other Americans that lived in the same time period that had spent time in France that brought the idea of eating deep fried thickly cut potato to America – and since then, that style of potato has kept the name “French Fries.”

So how did the ubiquitous snack of “Potato Chips” come about? As an aside, what Americans and Canadians call “Potato Chips,” in the UK is referred to as “crisps.”

It was a Native American Chef that apparently came up with the first “Potato Chips,” while working in a restaurant in Saratogo Springs, New York. On the menu that night was “French Fries,” but one of the guests continued to complain that the deep fried potatoes that he had ordered were too thick. Out of exasperation, the chef, George Crum, sliced the potatoes so thin that he knew they would be impossible to be picked up with a fork – and to his utter surprise, discovered that the dissatisfied guest was delighted with the result.

That began a brand new product for Crum and the restaurant he was working at – and originally, Potato Chips were packaged and sold as “Saratoga Chips.”

It wasn’t until the 1920’s, with the invention of a mechanical potato peeler, that “potato chips” could be made more efficiently, produced and packaged – and now have become a major source of snack food throughout the world.

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