Crisps and chips

I love potato chips, but am not a fan of french fries, so I'm all confused when I'm in Britain where "chips" are "crisps" and "fries" are "chips"!

One reason I like potato chips is because they are salty and savory to counteract all the sweets I consume, so I keep a big box of 18 small bags of chips and Doritos, Cheetos, and Fritos on hand to rescue me from hunger pangs whenever I feel them coming on.  But I dislike Pringles because they're not real.

The British take their crisps more seriously than any other nation No other snack bridges the class divide in the same way Economist (12/19/24)

This is a book review of Crunch: An Ode to Crisps. By Natalie Whittle. Faber; 256 pages; £18.99

GERMANS OPT for döner kebab flavour; South Koreans like theirs sprinkled with “honey butter” powder; and Canadians nibble on a dill pickle iteration. Britons prefer cheese and onion—but it is a close-run thing. According to some estimates, around 6bn packets of crisps are sold in Britain each year. Whenever Brits are feeling peckish, they reach for the low-effort, high-sodium snack, as Natalie Whittle, a journalist, observes in “Crunch”, a tasty history of the foodstuff Americans insist on calling “potato chips”.

Were it not for two British biochemists, crisps would be rather bland. Around eighty years ago, Archer Martin and Richard Synge pioneered partition chromatography, which allowed substances in complex mixtures to be singled out and identified with ease. (They won the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1952 for their efforts.) Alongside other uses, this technique helped crisp-makers map flavours and recreate them by mixing different compounds.

In the 1950s Tayto, an Irish brand, produced cheese-and-onion crisps; in America Herr’s introduced barbecue seasoning. Today there are more than 1,000 crisp flavours worldwide, ranging from mustard mayonnaise to salmon sushi, baked beans and salted egg.

Potatoes have been a staple of humans’ diets for millennia, but it took time for the crisp to take its slender shape. The tuberous vegetable was fried in lard in Regency England—and sliced and dunked in vats of olive oil in Belle Époque France—but it did not find its thinnest, crunchiest form until the late 1800s.

That is when “saratoga chips” began to appear in a swish resort town in upstate New York. (Legend has it that a disgruntled restaurant patron demanded thinner and thinner fried potatoes until the cook turned out brittle, paper-thin slices.) In 1878 a journalist declared the crisp a sensible choice for travellers and “admirable as a breakfast dish”. Mikesell’s, a company in Ohio, was soon mass-producing them.

In the early 20th century peckish Brits were still buying baked potatoes whole, and hot, from street hawkers. A canny merchant from London visited Paris in 1909 and spied a vendor selling “perles de Paris”: potato wafers fried in “delectable” amounts of oil. Impressed, he recruited the Frenchman and brought him back to London. Within a decade factories across England were churning out this type of crisp too.

Regardless of the American headstart, Ms Whittle is adamant that Britain can comfortably claim the title of most crisp-obsessed nation. Crisps help to make the humble potato Britain’s most beloved vegetable; the average household buys around 250 grams of processed potatoes a week. To the alarm of healthy-eating advocates, Britons buy more manufactured potato products, such as crisps and chips, than they do fresh greens.

Many foodstuffs are circumscribed by occasion and eater—but not crisps, which rustle between social classes. The packets can be spied on building sites, in pubs and at cocktail parties; they complete meal deals, bridge hunger gaps and fuel festivities. When the “salty siren” calls, the British take heed. ■

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I like the way you can make chips / crisps taste like almost anything on the savory side.  That must mean that, by themselves (without even salt) they are fundamentally neutral, and don't pair well with sugar — thank goodness!  Food processors put sugar in / on practically everything else.

 

Selected readings

• "Italian Red Meat Flavor potato chips" (6/12/19)
• "Retraction watch: Irish roots of "french fries"?" (5/18/24)
• "Potato crisp?" (6/5/09) — a British judge rules that Pringles are potato chips; I beg to disagree
• "Chips, fleas, lovers, colors, and crusts" (112/13/24)
• "Death by french fries" (6/18/17)
• "Gyro, part 3" (10/7/24)
• "Gyro, part 2" (9/28/24)
• "Gyro" (6/26/20)

[Thanks to Mark Metcalf]