HIP HIP HOORAY for POTATO CHIP DAY! 🎉🥔

Even though i ‘celebrate’ potato chips (almost) erry day…

By: Tonya Hopkins aka The Food Griot, Sharing Savory True Stories on the Makings of American Cuisine…

👇🏾 The carousel of pics below documents me making my first batch of homemade potato chips, during a culinary media makers’ immersive upstate in Rensselaerville, NY, some moons ago. 👇🏾 Not too far, in fact, from a place called Moon’s Lake House, where the American snack phenom known as potato chips came to be!…

The Crunch Heard Around the World: George Crum & the Birth of the American Potato Chip

Did you know the American potato chip as we know it was first created/innovated in upstate New York by a Black cook / chef named George Crum ? He worked at the above-mentioned Moon’s Lake House on Saratoga Lake way back in 1853.

Sure, thinly sliced, deep-fried potatoes had happened elsewhere in various forms. But—arguably—George’s fine dining delicacy, fried up on the fly, marks the true beginning of America’s fascination with paper-thin slices of potato, deep-fried in the right kind of oil (let’s keep it real—it was some kinda rendered fat back then), at the right temperature, for the perfect amount of time. The result? Bright golden crisps ( as they call ’em in the UK) that barely look cooked.

To be clear, potato chips—like people—come in a complex range of hues. Some get a bit of caramelization (see my carousel pics below 👇🏾), nonetheless I find it pretty amazing that an artfully achieved crisp can happen regardless of a tater chip’s tinge. But I DIGRESS…

Snack Royalty: Potato Chips Reign Supreme

Potato chips have consistently held the top spot as the #1 snack food in America—in sales, popularity, AND frequency of consumption, and for quite some time now (1/2 a century?) according to various industry reports and market analyses. No surprise, then, that I love shining a light on the often-overlooked influence of Black Americans on the snack industry including the oft not adequately compensated ingenuity of innovators like George Crum.

From Fine Dining to Snack Aisles: Black Culinary Innovation Runs Deep

A key phrase I typed earlier is “fine dining”—because most Americans don’t realize that many of the foods we take for granted started out in fine dining establishments at the hands of highly skilled Black chefs, cooks, caterers, confectioners and other culinary & hospitality professionals

And this wasn’t just in the Deep South—it happened all over America. In fact, across ALL the Americas when we include the Caribbean, Central, and South America. And for centuries.

Years ago, I started researching the enormous impact Black culinarians have had on the development of fine dining throughout the Northeast—including places like Brooklyn and Saratoga—back when our aptly named Mr. Crum created the precursor to what brands like Lay’s would turn into a billion-dollar business.

Another Culinary Trailblazer: Anne Hampton Northup

Anne Northup (b. in 1808 on March 14th! cosmic coincidence ? )… the wife of Solomon Northup (who wrote the bestselling biographical memoir 12 Years a Slave, first published in 1853 actually), was a culinary contemporary of George Crum.

Anne was a highly accomplished cook in high demand who cooked and catered professionally for elite clients (read: wealthy whites). Before the advent of restaurants as we know them, Anne ran professional kitchens for decades in the Saratoga region and later here in New York city — at a now famous location during the (12) years her husband (a talented fiddler & violinist, raftsman, carpenter, etc.) was ‘away’ enduring enslavement with no intended endpoint if his captors had prevailed.

it was in March in fact ~ of 1841 – when Northup was lured from Saratoga Springs, NY, to Washington, D.C., under the false promise of work and instead kidnapped into slavery.

Both Anne and Solomon had been born free — and he lived as such well into adulthood until being kidnapped, abducted, and sold into American chattel slavery. He was then shipped (literally) to the deepest South of Louisiana, where he endured a dehumanized existence working in barbaric labor camps for twelve years before regaining his freedom.

Not the most optimal photo opp with Lupita yrs later at one of the African/American exhibit VIP events in Harlem in 2022…

At the request of the Saratoga chapter of the Underground Railroad Association, I’d researched and learned all of this and then some (in exchange for a “whopping” $100 honorarium check) prior to the adaptation and release of Solomon’s memoir in film form in 2013, also called “Twelve Years a Slave” which won THREE Academy Awards (aka Oscars) in 2014 (Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actress for a then ‘unknown’ Lupita Nyong'o  who was at the Solomon Northup Day’ 2013 event where I made a presentation focused on Anne Northup. There Lupita also presented and talked a bit about the then soon to be released film in her role that day representing Fox Searchlight Pictures …If i recall correctly our presentations followed each others back to back….

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To Learn more about :

✅ Anne’s incredible culinary work

✅ Solomon’s drastically different food experiences while enslaved and away from his family

✅ and/or to simply get more crispy, crunchy (hers) and (his)tory on POTATO CHIPS —beyond the crumbs dropped here (get it?)

👉🏾JOIN my PATREON — and I’ll look forward to seeing you there!👈🏽

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And/or Explore More Fab FREE Food Holidays HERE in the food & drink holiday calendar for a bird’s-eye view of what else is happening this month

🗓 See also: SNACK FOODS DAY which fell on March 4th this year…..