For decades after they were invented, potato chips (British potato crisps) were all the rage, available at every restaurant in the U.S. I’m not talking about the factory-made cold and pale imitation you can buy in a bag in the grocery store; I’m talking about hot potato chips fresh out of the vat, with just the right amount of grease still clinging to them. Nowadays, you should consider yourself lucky if you know of one or two restaurants in your area where they are still served that way.
How did French fries (British chips) come to dominate the fried-potato niche on restaurant menus? Did any major fast-food restaurant chain ever sell freshly fried potato chips?
The truth is, I don’t think they’re as good as french fries. They’re greasier and less substantial and don’t taste as good. So maybe they’ve phased 'em out because people don’t like 'em as well?
FTR french fries and British chips are two differant things.
Chips made British style are potatos deep fried and cut into strips usually no smaller than [sup]3[/sup]/[sub]4[/sub]" byb[sup]3[/sup]/[sub]4[/sub]" in section and normally somewhat larger than that.
French fries are normally far thinner so that there is hardly any potato filling as it has all been turned into fried potato shell.
I also have come across french fries that have been made with a high percentage of corn.
My WAG is that eating a handful of potato chips doesn’t feel like a “serving”, like part of a “meal”, the way a handful of big rectangular hunks of potato does, so it’s a psychological thing. A handful of potato chips is obviously a “snack”, not a “serving”.
Also, it’s harder for the restaurants to store potato chips. You can fit 100 portions of frozen french fries into a single corner of the freezer, but 100 individual bags of potato chips are going to need a lot more space.
In some “posh” restaurants here in the UK these freshly made potato crisps are called “game chips”. Perhaps theyare meant to be served with pheasant and other game birds.
My WAG follows DDG. More surface area is exposed in the chip style. That would tend to cause a problem with shelf life.
But David Cronan has caused me to grab a reference book:
French fries did not reach England until roughly 1870, according to C. Anne Wilson, the British food historian. They really were French in origin, a commercial food from the start, produced by street vendors in Paris in quarter-moon shapes and called pommes Pont-Neuf. This matters to the history of the potato chip because the chip is a special case of the French fry itself. Raymond Sokolov points out that the earliest recipe he knows for potato chips comes from Mary F. Henderson’s Practical Cooking and Dinner Going, published in New York in 1878. You’ll find this referenced in Susan Williams’s survey, Savory Suppers and Fashionable Feasts: Dining in Victorian America(Pantheon, 1985).
Anyhow, Henderson calls her chips Saratoga potatoes. This lends support to the anecdote repeated in The American Heritage Cookbook that potato chips were invented by accident at the Moon Lake House in Saratoga Springs, NY, by George Crum. This mixture of legend and fact does seem to fit into a logical scenario: The French fry reaches England around 1870. A recipe for Saratoga chips (potato chips) appears in an American book in 1878.
Back to Raymond Sokolov…He points out that “Chips” in England are what we call French fries, but English potato chips, in the American sense, are always called crisps except in the one situation when they are handmade and served with game. This exception supports the idea of a separate invention of the potato chip in England. Someone like Chef Crum must have sliced potatoes thin, but this chef decided to serve them with game. Instead of viewing his invention as a special new thing, he saw it as a kind of French fry (chip). Instead of becoming a popular food in England, the game chip was limited to the aristocratic table during hunting season. Later, when the similar but visibly different (larger, thinner, drier) American chip arrived, it couldn’t be called chip, so a new term was created: crisp.
I’ve always been curious about those “first example” researches, particularly with regards to food. Doesn’t it seem kind of silly? I mean, really, just how innovative is it…potato…boiling grease…salt…thin slicing…and only 1 person in the entire world had the bright idea to combine them?
Well, but there are steak fries, which have a larger profile and amount of potato inside. And crinkle-cut, which are also larger than the fried potato shell fries.
Building on what GIGI said in response to CASDAVE –
In the U.S., we have everything from the long skinny tiny fries (what my grandmother used to call “shoestring fries”) to “jo-jo’s,” when are basically potatoes quartered lenghtwise and then fried up. We call 'em all “french fries.” So I don’t think its entirely accurate to say the English french fries are different from American french fries. My experience from eating fries in both places is that they’re basically the same.
–Well, if you look back at our greatest “inventions” weren’t most of them just a new combination of things we already knew about? That’s one lesson I took away from James Burke and his TV series of a decade ago.
In the case of the potato, it took roughly 250 years to make its way from Peru to Spain and then to be naturalized and adopted as a popular food. Two centuries had to pass before Europeans were persuaded that this relative of the deadly nightshade (and the equally suspect tomato) was fit for more than pigs. Since the potato did not “arrive” in France as a staple food until the early 1800s, it seems logical that French fries did not exist until somewhat later.
So called “southern frying” and other forms of deep-fat frying associated with the antebellum South are echoes of palm oil cooking still basic to the old slave coast of Africa. So the method of cooking had to be imported as well as the object being cooked.
This is a WAG, but I’m thinking quality control. The thinner the slice, the much lower the margin of error in cooking. If you have very thin “chip sliced” potatoes, they go from raw to cooked to burned very quickly. Larger cuts will stay at “just about perfect” for quite a while. If the restaurant staff is distracted or incompetent, they probably ruin a lot more batches of chips than waffle fries.
Many places that cook relatively small fries (e.g. McDonalds) have very precise cookers and timers to make sure they get adequate quality control, but more chaotic kitchens might have a big enough problem with ruined batches that they just take the hard stuff off the menu.
This link tells you how to make Game Chips:- http://www.hookerycookery.com/xmas006.htm
You will see that the potatoes are double fried. This is the secret of making the best chips and crisps.This is how they fry their "frites"in Belgium and they are the best in the world.
