The remarkable story of how one highly agitated customer inspired a chef’s yummy revenge...
Which in turn ignited a nation-wide hunger for one of the country’s most favorite snack foods (now valued at $30 billion)
Travel back in time to the 1800s and visit the northeastern region of New York near the southern border of Canada, and you’ll enter what was then known as The Mohawk nation.
The Mohawk tribe was part of the Iroquois Confederacy, which was made up of six native Indian nations. The Mohawks happened to be one of four nations that sided with the British during the Revolutionary War.
After the Americans won the war, the tribe was forced to surrender their land. Most Mohawks migrated to Canada, where the government gave them new territory to settle.
Now the reason I’m telling you this Dear Reader is because George Speck, was born in 1824 to Abraham Speck who was African American, and Diana Tull who’s family was was from the Huron tribe.
The Hurons were bitter enemies of the Iroquois Confederacy because they were constantly fighting one another for control of the fur trade. And as a young man, George just happened to be a part of the fur trade.
He also served as a guide for people who needed to pass through the Adirondack Mountains.
But he also happened to be a dam good cook. In fact by the summer of 1853 he had already made a name for himself as a renowned chef who worked at Moon’s Lake House, one of Saratoga Lake’s most popular restaurants.
The Lake House catered to mostly wealthy Manhattan families who traveled to the area during their summer vacations.
One of the wealthy people that happened to dine at the Lake House was shipping and railroad tycoon, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt. Now legend says that Mr. Vanderbilt couldn’t remember George’s last name, only that it was related to something small … like a crumb.
And thus George Speck forever there after became known as George Crum.
Where Art Thou French Fry?
One of the side dishes that George Crum often served Mr. Vanderbilt as well as the other patrons of the restaurant were French fries.
Now George Crum didn’t invent French fries. Nope, they had been around for centuries.
In fact common lore is that French fries were the creation of Frédéric Krieger, a Bavarian musician who lived in Paris in 1842.
When Mr. Krieger wasn’t busy playing music, you’d find him on rue Montmartre with his roaster cooking French fries.
Two years later, he moved to Belgium and set up a little shop he dubbed Fritz. And in that shop, he sold "la pomme de terre frite à l'instar de Paris," otherwise known as Paris-style fried potatoes.
But hold on.
According to Albert Verdeyen, chef, and co-author of Carrement Frites, which charts the history of French fries says they were actually invented by the locals who lived in Namur Belgium.
Now Namur sits near the river Meuse, which flows through Belgium, France, and the Netherlands. The river is an important source of drinking water, serving at least 7 million people.
It’s also a major source of fish including perch, pike, carp, and catfish. They say the water is so clear (unpolluted), that the different species of fish swimming in the river grow to enormous sizes.
That’s one of the reasons the citizens of Namur fish the river so frequently. After catching the fish, they then fry them in refined beef or horse fat.
Mr. Verdeyen says that back in 1680, the winter season got so cold that the river actually froze over. And that meant that the people living there couldn’t catch any fish, which was a main stable of their diet.
So what’s a town to do when the river freezes over, and you can no longer eat fried fish?
Well you fry potatoes instead. And that’s exactly what the people of Namur did. They sliced the potatoes into thin strips because this way they would fry much faster.
However Mr. Verdeyen says that the people of Namur never called them French fries. In fact he says it’s not really a “French fry” but a “Francophone fry.”
Why Francophone fry? Well Francophone is the name given to 29 countries where French is designated the official language including Belgium, Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Canada, Chad, the Ivory Coast, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, France, Haiti, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Mali, Monaco, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, Seychelles, Switzerland, Togo, and Vanuatu.
And it was American soldiers stationed in the region during World War I that called the fried potatoes, French fries. The name has stuck ever since.
But it’s not just Belgium people who love French fries. They are served in several countries including Spain, South Korea, France, the UK, Greece, Canada, and the list goes on and on.
And of course they are served here in the U.S. In fact they were introduced to American citizens sometime in 1845.
We sure do love French fries with Americans consuming roughly 30 pounds a year. French fries were certainly loved by the people who ate at Moon’s Lake House back in 1853.
The Twisted Tale of The Sliced Potato
Now we know that chef George Crum didn’t invent the French fry, but legend says he might have created the next closest thing to it … fried slices of potatoes, or the potato chip.
The story goes something like this …
Chef Crum had served a batch of French fries to one of the restaurant’s regular customers, which is rumored to have been none other than Mr. Vanderbilt.
Mr. Vanderbilt was in a particular mood that day and thought the French fries were way to thick and mushy. Agitated with the way the fries were served; he told the waiter to send them back to the kitchen and tell Mr. Crum to make another batch.
But Chef Crum thought the batch was perfect in size and taste. However he wasn’t going to argue with one of Moon Lake House’s most valuable customers. Any confrontation might cost him his job.
So you could say that Chef Crum got revenge over the angry customer by taking the time to slice the potatoes extra thin. And instead of cutting them in strips, he sliced them into round pieces. Then he fried them until they were lightly browned on the outside and crispy in taste and texture.
When the fried potato chips were presented to Mr. Vanderbilt, he took a bite of one and loved it.
But he wasn’t the only one who loved this new dish.
Visitors came from far and wide to Moon's Lake House for a taste of the famous “crums chips” as they were called. Some people were willing to travel a 10-mile trip around the lake just to get to the restaurant.
But hold on. Some people disagree that George Crum was the true inventor of the potato chip. And this is where our story takes a little twist.
Turns out that George’s sister Katie also worked at Moon’s Lake House as a cook, alongside her brother.
And it’s Katie Wicks who claimed to be the real inventor of the potato chip. Katie explains that she had sliced off a sliver of a potato and it accidentally fell into a hot frying pan.
Not wanting to toss the fried potato out, she asked her brother George to give it a taste. He ate it and knew instantly customers would love this new kind of fried potato chip.
Now no one can say with certainty that Katie invented the potato chip. The only mention of it was in her obituary, which was published in The Saratogian in 1924. It read, "A sister of George Crum, Mrs. Catherine Wicks, died at the age of 102, and was the cook at Moon’s Lake House. She first invented and fried the famous Saratoga Chips."
But wait there’s more to our twisted tale.
Yet another person also claimed to be the inventor and that was Cary Moon, the owner of Moon’s Lake House. She too took credit for the invention and even distributed potato chips in boxes.
Whether George, Katie or Cary invented the chip is up for debate, but what we do know is that people who visited Moon’s Lake house loved these new potato chips as much as French fries.
The Traveling Potato Chip
Because George had achieved such notoriety as a great culinary chef, in 1860 he opened his own restaurant, called Crum's, on Storey Hill in Malta, New York.
His cuisine was in high demand among Saratoga Springs' tourists and elites. The prices of his dishes matched those of the most fashionable and prominent New York restaurants. And he provided every table served with a basket of Crums’ chips.
George Crum’s chips remained a local delicacy until the 1920s when just about everyone throughout the state of New York had either tasted or heard about these incredible fried potato chips.
And since the recipe for making them was so easy, almost anyone could make a batch of chips. Eventually potato chips were being served and sold everywhere.
But it would be one man who would make them world famous and that was Herman Lay. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because you recognize it for Lay’s Potato Chips.
It’s said that from an early age, Herman had an entrepreneurial spirit. For example, at age 10, he sold peanuts and soft drinks at the Greenville Spinners baseball games.
His first foray into the world of potato chips came in the late 1930s around the age of 21. At the time he worked as an independent salesman for Barrett Potato Chip Company in Atlanta. What’s so ironic about this position is that initially he declined the job because he doubted there was a future in the potato chip business.
But a short time later, he accepted the position. Not surprisingly, Herman did so well as a salesman, that by 1939 he had made enough money to buy a few potato chip factories of his own.
He bought two factories: One in Atlanta and the other in Memphis. He named his new company the H.W. Lay & Company and began making Lay’s Potato Chips. Just a few years later, he bought another factory in Florida and eventually had three more factories built.
In the 1950s, Herman began purchasing other snack food companies. He also expanded his product line from just snack foods to beverages such as Mountain Dew and Gatorade.
By 1961, H.W. Lay & Company merged with the manufacturer of Fritos corn chips and formed Frito-Lay, Inc. Then in 1965, Frito-Lay merged with Pepsi-Cola, which then became PepsiCo, Inc.
PepsiCo, Inc. is now one of the largest food, beverage, and snack companies in the U.S., with revenues reaching $67 billion. And the chips they produce are America’s favorite brand by a wide margin.
Lay’s potato chips account for nearly 41% of the entire market. The next largest contenders of chips are Ruffles and Pringles, with 18 and 13 percent share of the market.
Potato chips are loved the world over, making the market worth an estimated of $30.7 billion.
And we Dear Reader get to thank George (Crum) Speck for creating a snack that is “so light, so thin, so crisp, you can eat a million of them, but nobody can eat just one.”
Awesome Quotes by Awesome People
“You don’t need a silver fork to eat good food.”— Paul Prudhomme