George Crum

William Kitchiner's The Cook's Oracle (1817), also included techniques for such a dish.

George Speck (also known as George Crum; July 15, 1824 – July 22, 1914) was an American chef.

He was known for his role in popularizing potato chips in Upstate New York and was later mythologized as their creator.

Speck was born in Saratoga County, New York.

He was a member of the Mohawk people and likely also had African-American ancestry.

He worked as a hunter, guide and cook in the Adirondack Mountains, becoming noted for his culinary skills after being hired at Moon's Lake House near Saratoga Springs.

His specialties included wild meat, especially venison and duck.

Speck later left Moon's and opened his own restaurant, Crum's, in nearby Malta.

His establishment was popular among wealthy tourists and his reputation spread outside the Adirondacks.

Speck was known for serving thinly sliced fried potatoes at his restaurants, which subsequently became known as "Saratoga chips".

Speck was born on July 15, 1824 in Saratoga County in upstate New York.

Though information about his actual heritage is unclear, and he has been assumed to be African-American and mixed-race, Speck and his sister Catherine Wicks "both identified as members of the St. Regis Mohawk tribe."

George Speck did not have the opportunity to go to school and was deprived of proper education.

Speck developed his culinary skills at Cary Moon's Lake House on Saratoga Lake, noted as an expensive restaurant at a time when wealthy families from Manhattan and other areas were building summer "camps" in the area.

Speck and his sister, Wicks, also cooked at the Sans Souci in Ballston Spa, alongside another St. Regis Mohawk Indian known for his skills as a guide and cook, Pete Francis.

One of the regular customers at Moon's was shipping tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, who, although he savored the food, could never seem to remember Speck's name.

On one occasion, he called a waiter over to ask "Crum", "How long before we shall eat?"

Rather than take offense, Speck decided to embrace the nickname, figuring that, "A crumb is bigger than a speck."

Bradley repeated some material from that article, including that "Crum was born in 1828, the son of Abe Speck, a Mulatto jockey who had come from Kentucky to Saratoga Springs and married a Stockbridge Indian woman," and that, "Crum also claimed to have considerable German and Spanish blood."

In 1832, a recipe for fried potato "shavings" was included in a United States cookbook derived from an earlier English collection.

Similarly, N. K. M. Lee's cookbook, The Cook's Own Book (1832), has a recipe that is very similar to Kitchiner's.

By 1860, Speck had opened his own restaurant, called Crum's, on Storey Hill in nearby Malta, New York.

His cuisine was in high demand among Saratoga Springs' tourists and elites: "His prices were…those of the fashionable New York restaurants, but his food and service were worth it…Everything possible was raised on his own small farm, and that, too, got his personal attention whenever he could arrange it."

According to popular accounts, he was said to include a basket of chips on every table.

One contemporaneous source recalls that in his restaurant, Speck was unquestionably the man in charge: "His rules of procedure were his own. They were very strict, and being an Indian, he never departed from them. In the slang of the racecourse, he "played no favorites." Guests were obliged to wait their turn, the millionaire as well as the wage-earner. Mr. Vanderbilt once was obliged to wait an hour and a half for a meal...With none but rich pleasure-seekers as his guests, Speck kept his tables laden with the best of everything, and for it all charged Delmonico prices."

After his death, a local legend developed which credited Speck with the invention of potato chips.

However, according to Snopes, he "never made the claim that he had invented the potato chip, let alone claimed the tale as his own — those assertions emerged only many years after his death".

The New York Tribune ran a feature article on "Crum's: The Famous Eating House on Saratoga Lake" in December 1891, but mentioned nothing about potato chips.

Neither did Crum's commissioned biography, published in 1893, nor did one 1914 obituary in a local paper.

Another obituary states "Crum is said to have been the actual inventor of "Saratoga chips."" When Wicks died in 1924, however, her obituary authoritatively identified her as follows: "A sister of George Crum, Mrs. Catherine Wicks, died at the age of 102, and was the cook at Moon’s Lake House. She first invented and fried the famous Saratoga Chips."

Wicks recalled the invention of Saratoga Chips as an accident: she had "chipped off a piece of the potato which, by the merest accident, fell into the pan of fat. She fished it out with a fork and set it down upon a plate beside her on the table."

Her brother tasted it, declared it good, and said, "We’ll have plenty of these."

In a 1932 interview with the Saratogian newspaper, her grandson, John Gilbert Freeman, asserted Wicks's role as the true inventor of the potato chip.

Hugh Bradley's 1940 history of Saratoga contains some information about Speck, based on local folklore as much as on any specific historical primary sources.

This myth featured in national advertising campaigns in the 1970s.

More detailed versions include claims that he invented potato chips by accident or to appease a difficult customer, often cited as Cornelius Vanderbilt; some accounts also claim that the true inventor was Speck's sister Catherine Wicks.

In their 1983 article in Western Folklore, Fox and Banner say that Bradley had cited an 1885 article in the Hotel Gazette about Speck and BI the potato chips.

The first published recipes for potato chips date from the early 19th century, decades before his career as a chef.

However, after Speck's death various newspaper articles and local histories of Saratoga County began to claim him as the "inventor" of potato chips.

Recipes for frying potato slices were published in several cookbooks in the 19th century.