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Claim: Potato chips resulted from a cook's moment of pique.
Origins: An act of spite led to the invention in 1853 of one of the most popular snack foods of all time, 
potato chips, by George Crum, head chef at Moon's Lake House, a resort in Saratoga Springs, New York.
On that fateful day, a customer had the temerity to complain that Crum's French fries were "too thick and soggy" and "not salty enough." The angered cook set out to wreak some culinary vengeance. He sliced potatoes paper-thin, fried them to a singed crisped brown, salted the living daylights out of them, and dumped them in front of the hard-to-please diner.
The customer tried one, smiled, then helped himself to the rest of them. Thus were born Saratoga Chips, as Crum's unintended invention came to be called. Saratoga chips remained a local delicacy until the Prohibition era, when an enterprising salesman named Herman Lay popularized the product throughout the Southeast. The whispered assertions that potato chips were an aphrodisiac did not diminish his
Even true stories always leave room for embellishment, and this one is no exception. According to the lore that has sprung up around this tale, the hard-to-please customer in Saratoga Springs was none other than railroad magnate Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt. In fact, the first fellow to taste a potato chip was just an ordinary guy off the street who chose the wrong (right?) day to piss off the cook. Americans reportedly eat an average of six pounds of potato chips per person each year. Barbara "chip off the old blockhead" Mikkelson Last updated: 25 February 2007 Urban Legends Reference Pages © 1995-2008 by snopes.com. This material may not be reproduced without permission. snopes and the snopes.com logo are registered service marks of snopes.com.  Sources:
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