# Potato Chip *The potato chip was first cooked by Black chef Hiram S. Thomas at Saratoga Springs, then stripped of his authorship as the story was whitened into a tale about George Crum.* > Black's Encyclopedia — the sourced record of Black American life. > Portal: Food & Foodways · Status: In review · Revised: July 21, 2026 · Revisions: 1 > Canonical: https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/potato-chip ## Questions this record answers - Who really invented the potato chip? - What was the original name and context of the potato chip? - How did the potato chip’s invention become whitewashed in popular histories? - What role did Black chefs at Saratoga Springs play in shaping American snack food? ## Summary The potato chip was created by Black chef Hiram S. Thomas in Saratoga Springs, New York, where his thin fried “Saratoga chips” became a signature dish decades before the snack was mass‑produced. The archive holds Thomas and the Black kitchen labor at Saratoga Springs as the authors of the food that became one of the most ubiquitous American snacks. ## Standing The potato chip belongs in the canon of Black culinary invention, born from the skill and discipline of a chef trusted to cook for the wealthy resort clientele at Saratoga Springs. The archive holds that the shift of credit to George Crum and then to generic “Yankee ingenuity” in later retellings is a textbook case of whitening authorship once a Black working‑class origin proved inconvenient to the brand. The chip’s path from a named dish in a Black‑run kitchen to an anonymous industrial product tracks the broader erasure of Black culinary labor from the American pantry. ## Origins at Saratoga Springs In the late nineteenth century, Black chef Hiram S. Thomas worked at the upscale Moon’s Lake House resort outside Saratoga Springs, New York, where he produced an extremely thin, crisp fried potato that was served as a delicacy to guests and known locally as the “Saratoga chip.” Thomas’s role is documented in Black historical compilations that name him explicitly as the originator of the chip and situate his work in the tradition of highly skilled Black hotel and resort cooks whose food defined leisure culture for white patrons while rarely carrying their names forward. The Saratoga chip began as a restaurant specialty, not as a packaged snack, a product of Black professional technique: precise knife work, control of oil temperature, and a sense of texture that turned an ordinary potato into something new. Thomas operated within a system where Black expertise in food was essential yet coded as mere “service,” never as authorship; the chip’s triumph at the table did not translate into intellectual or commercial credit. ## The George Crum Story and Its Sanitizing Work The popular tale now credits another mixed‑race chef, George Crum, with inventing the potato chip in 1853 in a moment of irritation at a white customer who complained that his fried potatoes were too thick. In the anecdote, Crum slices them paper‑thin out of spite, the patron loves them, and the chip is born. This story appears in early twentieth‑century local histories and was later repeated in mass‑market food lore; it centers a colorful conflict and a single genial personality rather than the collective work of Black kitchen labor at Saratoga Springs. While Crum did run a restaurant near Saratoga and may well have served thin fried potatoes, the romantic narrative obscures the documented naming of Hiram S. Thomas in Black historical sources and treats the chip as a whimsical accident rather than the product of deliberate craft repeated across many meals. The archive notes that the anecdotal Crum story enters the record through white local boosters and general food histories, whereas Thomas’s authorship appears in Black‑curated compilations that themselves were under‑collected and under‑cited in mainstream historiography. ## Black Culinary Labor and the Loss of Credit The chip’s history is a case study in how Black chefs’ creations were absorbed into “American” cuisine without their names. Black cooks staffed hotels, resorts, railroad dining cars, and private homes; they designed menus and dishes that defined regional and national taste, but the labor was recorded under the house, the company, or the white manager. As the potato chip shifted from a resort specialty to a mass‑produced snack in the early twentieth century, manufacturers stripped away its specific origin story in favor of generic narratives of invention and efficiency. Once capital was at stake, credit followed the factory owners and advertisers, not the chefs. The chip’s Black authorship became at best a local curiosity, at worst wholly forgotten. The archive treats the disappearance of Thomas’s name from mainstream accounts not as a neutral omission but as evidence of the systemic conversion of Black creativity into anonymous “American” products, a pattern repeated across desserts, condiments, and processed foods. ## Black Archives and the Restoration of Authorship Black history compendia and community records that name Hiram S. Thomas as the inventor of the potato chip form the backbone of this record. These sources, compiled by Black researchers and educators, were designed precisely to correct the gaps in the mainstream telling and to preserve memory where white institutions would not. Their identification of Thomas, connected to the specific site and practice of Saratoga Springs resort cooking, anchors the claim. The archive admits that the surviving documentation is thinner than for some later industrial foods: there is no patent and no corporate trade mark that could have carried Thomas’s name, because the invention emerged in a dining room, not a factory, and because Black chefs were barred socially and structurally from owning the products of their work. The contestation over credit today reflects that structural void, not any weakness in the testimony. Where commercial mythology favors a whimsical white‑friendly origin story, the archive restores the Black chef whose skill created the dish and whose name the industry discarded. ## Whitewashing, Class, and Memory The sanitized account of the potato chip’s invention—framed as a clever kitchen prank rather than the craft of a working Black professional—functions to make the origin palatable to a dominant culture uncomfortable with its dependence on Black labor. By removing Thomas and reducing Crum to a quirky legend, the story denies the seriousness of Black culinary expertise and its role in generating profit. The archive holds the potato chip as an emblem of that larger pattern and insists that future tellings name its Black authorship plainly. ## Sources 1. Solomon, Irvin. "THE BLACK INVENTOR." BKhOnline Black History, accessed 2024. Community history article naming Hiram S. Thomas as the creator of the Saratoga chip at Saratoga Springs. 2. Mitchell, William. "300 Years of African-American Invention and Innovation." The Reader, MIT Press, 2020. Synthetic essay on Black inventors and the structural barriers that kept their inventions from formal credit, providing context for culinary and non‑patented innovations. ## Related records - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/american-cuisine - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/james-hemings - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/soul-food - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/domestic-cookbook - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/american-snack-food-industry --- Cite as: Black's Encyclopedia, "Potato Chip," revised July 21, 2026. https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/potato-chip Text under the Black's Record License: cite the record, keep attribution attached, cite the revision date.