…is just one of the many slogans attached to television adverts for Walkers crisps which starred Gary Lineker. The former England football captain turned tv pundit and National Treasure was usually featured stealing someone else’s crisps.
I don’t know if the crisps above are Walkers finest but they look extremely moreish to me. Then I never could resist a crisp, and I dread to think how many potatoes have been used in creating all those I’ve eaten in my lifetime. It’s probably best that I don’t know. What I can tell you is that around 140,000 tonnes of crisps are sold in Britain every year. There’s some debate about which is the most popular flavour but cheese and onion, salt and vinegar and ready salted are always near the top in any survey.
First things first, though. Let’s go back to the beginning of the history of the potato crisp as we know and love it. There are lots of claimants to the role of the inventor of the crisp, but most food historians agree that the first known reference to something resembling the modern crisp was in The Cook’s Oracle. This cookery book first published in 1817 - a best seller on both sides of the Atlantic – was the work of William Kitchiner (1775–1827) . His recipe for “Potatoes fried in Slices or Shavings”. sprinkled with “a very little salt”, is the first known reference to ready-salted crisps. During the following decade, his version of this recipe turned up in many recipe books.
A much quoted – and almost certainly apocryphal – American origin story is that in 1853 a cook called George Crum in a restaurant in Saratoga New York was infuriated by a customer sending back fried potatoes because they were ‘too thick’. Crum retaliated by cutting the spuds wafer thin and deep frying them till they were hard and crispy and salted them heavily thinking they’d be inedible. The customer loved them and the crisp was born (though it was then called a chip and still is in the US). Since Kitchiner’s book was widely available in the USA it’s improbable that Crump invented the crisp though he did open his own restaurant where a basket of crisps sat invitingly on every table and so was certainly an early populariser of the snack.
I haven’t come across any record of crisps/chips being on sale generally until 1895. Then William Tappenden, an Ohio merchant, came up with a way to keep them stocked on shelves, using his kitchen and, later, a barn in his backyard to make the chips and deliver them in barrels to local markets via horse-drawn wagon. Others quickly followed suit including Mikesell’s Potato Chip Company which began production on an industrial scale in Dayton, Ohio in 1910 but didn’t start selling them in bags and distributing to grocery stores until the late 1920s.
It’s just possible that it was on this side of the Atlantic that crisps were first sold commercially on a large scale. The Smiths Potato Crisps Company Ltd began selling crisps packed in greaseproof bags in 1920. Available mainly in London at first sales were slow but respectable. Then in 1925 they came up with the idea of providing a twist of salt with the crisps, and in a genius move persuaded pub landlords to stock them. Customers made thirstier by the salty crisps bought more beer and sales of crisps (and beer) soared.
Children in the UK in the fifties – often on a drive back from a day back at the seaside – would be treated to a bottle of lemonade or ginger beer and a bag or two of Smith’s Crisps with their little blue sachet of salt while their parents popped into a pub for a quick drink. My dad was always very cheerful when he drove us home and I can still remember the smell of beer in the car. Of course there were no seat belts in those days. I wonder how many of such visits ended in disaster!
Crisps remained popular throughout the thirties and forties but the holy grail of adding another flavour to them remained out of reach. And then in 1954 Ireland’s Tayto Crisps came on the scene. With the encouragement of Tayto’s legendary owner Joe ‘Spud’ Murphy the technology to add seasoning during manufacture was developed and Cheese & Onion crisps were born. Production began at their Dublin factory where after being packed by hand in waxed greaseproof paper, the crisps were delivered to the retailer in an airtight tin, to help maintain their freshness.
I first discovered a flavoured variety in about 1961. Oxo crisps made by Skelmersdale based Chipmunk were sold in the school tuckshop. Apparently these were the first crisps to be packed in cellophane film and therefore didn’t need to be kept in a sealed container. They were exhibited at the International Packaging Fair in Olympia, London.
Golden Wonder – founded in 1947 – had been producing cheese and onion flavoured crisps for some time and were impressed by what they saw at Olympia. They followed Chipmunk’s cellophane example and within two years were Europe’s biggest producer of crisps. As far as I know nobody else ever produced Oxo flavoured crisps though Golden Wonder introduced beef flavour – perhaps as a result of Oxo’s popularity.
Smith’s launched salt and vinegar crisps in 1967 marking the beginning of a flavour war and four years later flavoured crisps made up 55 per cent of the industry’s total sales. These days you can buy crisps ‘flavoured’ with pretty much anything. Old stagers like smoky bacon and barbecue beef have been joined by pickled onion, baked camembert, salted caramel and katsu curry (to pick just a few at random). But according to a Tayto spokesman, ready salted are the most popular overall but cheese and onion crisps still make up around a third of their sales.
Incidentally, while writing this I discovered that Golden Wonder is a variety of potato. Very dry and floury it’s ideal for deep frying but if you boil it for too long it will disintegrate in the pan. That’s what they call a ‘fun fact’. Time for a bag of crisps and a beer, I think.