Crisps / Chips again
Associated with this post, here's an artefact, two anecdotes and an opinion.
The artefact is a slightly dented but still remarkably airtight "Charles Chips" tin.
It was bought, full, many years ago from the Vermont Country Store, from whom we subsequently bought reflll packs - given their size, "sacks" would be more accurate - which were shipped to Ireland in sturdy cardboard boxes.
VCS no longer carry Charles Chips in either tin or refill. I know. I checked. BUT...
The Charles Chips company, which per Wikipedia was doing just fine in 1990 then got sold and went bankrupt twice in less than three years (gosh!) is Back In Business, and note has been taken, with considerable interest - oh, you bet - that they do international shipping...
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Anecdote No. 1 is from when @dduane lived in Bala Cynwyd near Philadelphia, in what was known as "The House of Dangerously Single Women" (ahem). She tells me that the household used to get Charles Chips delivered to the door about twice a week, by the company's own vans.
Speaking as a long-time crisp fan, I found that both very neat and a source of mild envy. :->
Anecdote No. 2 is from 30-ish years ago, when we were in New York for something or other and, being rather jetlagged with our internal food clocks out of whack, did our usual thing and went out for a walk.
Curiously enough, this involved visiting several food stores and supermarkets where we bought a lot of Interesting Foreign or Much Missed (i.e. American, in both instances) junk food for grazing on back in our hotel room.
In one of them DD was about to lay claim to a huge bag of Wise potato chips (its bag would have been the design in the middle)...
...while nattering to one of the shop staff how much she missed them. He told her that a new delivery was expected in about 20 minutes and if she wanted to wait, she'd get much fresher chips.
And So It Came To Pass.
Well done, that guy!
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Finally, while Saratoga Springs may have been where potato crisps / chips were popularised, standardised, commercialised or whatever, it's definitely not where they were invented.
Even the oft-repeated "creation myth" frequently has its hard-to-please celebrity demanding to have his potatoes sliced and fried really thin "The Way I Had Them In France" - which kinda sorta suggests they were, um, being made there just like that well before the Saratoga thing happened.
Myths are okay, even marketing myths - so long as they're recognised as myths and not shilled as true by places with reputations like the Smithsonian.
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It's a bit like the still-current nonsense about spices being used in medieval kitchens to disguise bad meat. As far as I've been able to find out, this originated with a historian called J. C. Drummond in the late 1930s - yup, just before World War Two - simply because he didn't know his period terminology.
"Green" meant fresh - even nowadays, an inexperienced or immature person is "green" - so green cheese was newly made, and green meat was newly slaughtered, unaged and consequently tough and flavourless.
Just ask any steak fan the difference between a fresh steak and a 30-day dry aged one.
Drummond, in his overspecialised-scholarship wisdom, assumed that "green venison" meant meat which had gone off, and that a recipe to improve it with spices was to cover the bad smell and taste.
In fact it was somewhere between a marinade and a rub, meant to improve the tenderness and flavour of fresh meat as if it had aged for a while, thus shortening the waiting time between killing a beast and getting it to the table of a hungry court.
As I've said before, it's always easier for no-proofs-given pop history to dismiss medieval people as (insert derogatory observation here) than take the time needed to explain why and how they in their time were not that different to us in ours.
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PS: when looking for that previously posted stuff about green meat I found a post where, with even less evidence than Saratoga Springs inventing crisps, a Brit poster claimed Brits invented curry.
Snrk.
Among other more or less pertinent observations, I mentioned that what Brits invented was BRITISH curry, and anyone who has read "Nanny Ogg's Cookbook" will know what I meant by that... :->
