14 March: National Potato Chip Day

National Potato Chip Day celebrates the snacks known as potato chips in the US, or crisps in the UK. 10 things you didn't know about crisps:

1. According to legend, the potato chip was invented in Saratoga Springs, New York, when a chef called George Crum got sick and tired of one of his regular customers, Cornelius Vanderbilt, constantly complaining that his Potatoes weren't sliced thinly enough. Crum made potatoes sliced so thinly that once cooked, were too crisp to be eaten with a fork. Vanderbilt loved them. This was in 1853.
2. However, this may have been a somewhat fabricated tale as a recipe for something like crisps had already appeared in a cookbook some years earlier, in 1822. The dish was called "Potatoes fried in Slices or Shavings" and the method of making them was described thus: "peel large potatoes… cut them in shavings round and round, as you would peel a Lemon; dry them well in a clean cloth, and fry them in lard or dripping".
3. The crisp packet was invented in the 1920s by a California entrepreneur named Laura Scudder. Prior to that, crisps were sold over the counter from barrels and wrapped in wax paper. Laura's idea was to iron the wax paper to form a bag. She got her workers to take sheets of wax paper home and iron them into bags to pack the crisps in at the factory next day.
4. Talking of crisp packets, there's a reason why they seem to be mostly air. Or nitrogen, to be exact. The bags are pumped full of the gas for two reasons – to keep the crisps fresh and for cushioning to prevent the product from breaking or crumbling.
5. Flavoured crisps didn't come along until the 1950s. They'd been seasoned with Salt since the 1920s but it was an Irishman called Joe "Spud" Murphy who experimented with adding other seasoning and invented salt and vinegar and cheese and onion flavours. These are still two of the most popular crisp flavours in the UK, along with ready salted. In America, the most popular flavours are Regular, Barbecue, and Sour Cream and Onion.
6. Crisps are available in a myriad of flavours now which vary according to where in the world you happen to be. Prawn cocktail and roast beef are popular in the UK while Americans tuck in to buffalo wing, dill pickle, and Old Bay crab. Soy sauce, seaweed, and butter flavours are popular in Japan; in Greece oregano flavour is a top seller. Paprika, cassava, mint, mayonnaise, hoisin duck, tomato ketchup and Marmite flavours have also been produced. Some of the wackiest flavours have been hedgehog and Cajun squirrel. Which don't actually contain Hedgehog or Squirrel.
7. And then there are Pringles. Pringles are made a bit differently. Rather than slicing and frying potatoes, they're made from dried potato products which can be moulded into a uniform shape for stacking in the tube. They came along in 1968 and caused a furore in the US about what they should be called. Traditional crisp makers objected to them being called "potato chips" and the wrangling went on for years, until the company which made them gave in and called them “potato crisps”. The Pringle tube was invented by a man called Fredric J Baur. When he died, he willed that he should be cremated and his ashes buried in a Pringles tube.
8. The average Crisp is between 0.04 (0.1cm) and 0.09 (0.2cm) of an inch thick. Ridged crisps are around four times thicker.
9. It takes about five to six potatoes to make a 150g bag of crisps. In the UK, Walkers produce 10 million packs of crisps every day, using more than 350,000 tonnes of potatoes a year.
10. Corkers Crisps set a record in 2013 for the world’s biggest bag of crisps, which weighed more than a ton. They were also the first crisp makers to have their crisps taken into space in 2012.

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