Snack Royalty: Potato Chips Reign Supreme
Potato chips have consistently held the top spot as the #1 snack food in America—in sales, popularity, AND frequency of consumption, and for quite some time now according to various industry reports and market analyses. No surprise, then, that I love shining a light on the often-overlooked influence of Black Americans on the snack industry including the ingenuity of innovators like George Crum.
From Fine Dining to Snack Aisles: Black Culinary Innovation Runs Deep
A key phrase I typed earlier is “fine dining”—because most Americans don’t realize that many of the foods we take for granted started out in fine dining establishments at the hands of highly skilled Black chefs, cooks, caterers, confectioners and other culinary & hospitality professionals
And this wasn’t just in the Deep South—it happened all over America. In fact, across ALL the Americas when we include the Caribbean, Central, and South America. And it’s been happening for centuries.
Years ago, I started researching the enormous impact Black culinarians have had on the development of fine dining throughout the Northeast—including places like Brooklyn and Saratoga—back when our aptly named Mr. Crum created the precursor to what brands like Lay’s would turn into a billion-dollar business.
Another Culinary Trailblazer: Anne Hampton Northup
Anne Northup, the wife of Solomon Northup (who wrote the bestselling memoir 12 Years a Slave, first published in 1853 actually), was a culinary contemporary of George Crum.
Anne was a highly accomplished cook in high demand who cooked and catered professionally for elite clients (read: wealthy whites). Before the advent of restaurants as we know them, Anne ran professional kitchens for decades in the Saratoga region and later here in New York city — at a now famous location during the (12) years her husband (a talented musician, carpenter, etc.) was ‘away’ enduring enslavement with no intended endpoint if his captors had prevailed.
Both Anne and Solomon were born free — and he lived as such well into adulthood until being kidnapped, abducted, and sold into American chattel slavery. He was then shipped (literally) to the deepest South of Louisiana, where he endured a dehumanized existence working in brutal labor camps for twelve years before regaining his freedom.
At the bequest of the Saratoga chapter of the Underground Railroad Association, I’d researched and learned all of this prior to the adaptation and release of Solomon’s memoir in film form in 2013, also called “Twelve Years a Slave” which won an Academy Award for Best Picture in 2014. A then unknown Lupita Nyong'o was at the event where I presented this information — where she also presented to talk a bit about the soon to be released film on behalf of Fox Searchlight Pictures …
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To Learn more about :
✅ Anne’s incredible culinary work
✅ Solomon’s drastically different food experiences while enslaved and away from his family
✅ and/or to simply get more crispy, crunchy (hers) and (his)tory on POTATO CHIPS —beyond the crumbs dropped here (get it?)
👉🏾JOIN my PATREON — and I’ll look forward to seeing you there!👈🏽
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And/or Explore More Fab FREE Food Holidays HERE in the food & drink holiday calendar for a bird’s-eye view of what else is happening this month
🗓 See also: SNACK FOODS DAY which fell on March 4th this year…..
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