One Man’s Attempt To Snack Like A Princess

“Life,” the writer Shirley Conran once famously noted, “is too short to stuff a mushroom.”

Now however much I may disagree with her about stuffing mushrooms (gorgeous little button mushrooms stuffed with a brandied chicken liver mousse! meaty portabello mushrooms stuffed with brie and garlic and walnuts!), I must concede that Ms Conran was not on some anti-fungal crusade. She was, instead, making a much larger point about the uselessness of engaging in needlessly fiddly and time-consuming activities simply to prove their status or- even worse- their worth. Boiled down, if you think that presenting the world with a stuffed mushroom is what will finally show them all that you have it all and can do it all, you’ve probably got a very skewed idea of what having it all and doing it all actually means.

This thought, amongst a colorful array of others, occurred to me the other day when I faced up to the realities of a challenge I had set myself: making homemade potato chips.

I am of course referring to potato chips in the American sense (not the British), as in those paper-thin slices of potato you munch on while watching TV, or have alongside a club sandwich. They may be flavored, or just salted, but they must be crisp. Which is why the British don’t call them chips, but rather, crisps. Incidentally, this nomenclature does not hold true in Britain when said “crisps” are served alongside any form of game-by which I mean “food that has previously been shot,” not “a sporting event involving teams and a ball.” In British terms, that would be a “match”. When said crisps are served alongside food that has previously been shot, they instantly become “game chips”, which, in turn, have nothing to do with poker, or baccarat, or any other form of gambling activity. Less incidentally, the British term “crisps” would come back to haunt me.

How had I come to setting myself this challenge?  I had been interested in the history of the potato chip (or crisp) ever since I had first learned of its possibly apocryphal origins (which would also come back to haunt me, apocryphal or not). How to explain the enduring allure of a simple chip (or crisp) that, even in this age of tortilla chips, and lentil chips, and bagel chips, and pitta chips, and beetroot chips, and cassava chips, all with their seemingly endless variety of flavours, still commands fully one third of the US snack food market, and is the leading snack food across the entire globe? If a snack food had gone from being commercially produced as an apparent one-off to being made across the United States by little mom-and-pop stores, and thence to being produced in massive industrial quantities, couldn’t it be brought back home?

Well of course it can, and has. It didn’t take much of an internet search to discover that indeed many, many people do make their own potato chips. There are a great many recipes out there, and equally many people touting the joys of frying-or baking, if you’re phobic about frying- your own. My enthusiasm for attempting this for myself increased greatly with every “It’s so dang easy” account I read. And my enthusiasm went absolutely stratospheric when I recalled having read many years ago that one of the most glamorous, beautiful and heavenly creatures that ever lived was not above such a task.

Ladies and gentlemen, I mean none other than Her Serene Highness Princess Grace Of Monaco.

You most probably already know that Grace Kelly, late of Philadelphia, would become globally famous for her beauty, her poise, her talent, and for marrying rather well. But what you may not know about the Star Who Became An Actual Princess, is that she was equally famous among her family and friends for her homemade potato chips.

For decades after marrying  Rainier III (Rainier Louis Henri Maxence Bertrand Grimaldi, which is rather more of a mouthful than your average chip or crisp), she would still take time out from princessing duties to make and serve these chips to guests at their family retreat, Roc Agel.

Well! Thought I, if Princess Grace could do this, why shouldn’t I give it a go? It would probably be the only one of her achievements I could match. After all  I am male, sadly past the age of porcelain skin, don’t have enough hair to go blonde, am unlikely to marry a Prince (even in this enlightened age) and am never going to star in a series of iconic Alfred Hitchcock films unless they seriously re-define the term “Zombie Movie”. But surely I can at least make my own potato chips?

And with that inspiration, my thoughts took a somewhat hubristically entrepreneurial bent. Beyond just making chips like a princess with a day off, surely I could surpass Laura Scudder, who in 1926 formed her own potato chip company in Monterey, California , and was the first to send her chips out in wax paper bags-with a freshness date, no less- thus replacing the barrels which would leave chips crumbled and stale at the bottom. Or even Joe “Spud” Murphy, the Irishman who first developed the process of flavoring potato chips during manufacture. So what if he gave the world its first Cheese And Onion crisps back in the 1950s? Walkers Crisps here in the UK run a competition every few years for people to come up with new flavorings. The prize is worth a million quid! I could win that prize! And , like the Icarus of root vegetables, I concluded that I could fry even higher!  I, yes I, a humble foodie laboring away in a humble kitchen, would produce the world’s first Cheese And Onion potato chip that would be equally delicious as its forebears, without also inducing rapid-onset halitosis!

So, buoyed up with fantasies of being a Potato Chip Prince in my own right, I set to work.  I bought my kilo of potatoes, got home, and merrily began the task of peeling them and cutting out any knobbly or sprouty bits.

I use the term “merrily began” advisedly, because as anyone who cooks knows, there is something a tad disheartening about peeling potatoes, especially in bulk. But unless they’re baby new potatoes or you’re baking them, potatoes must be peeled. There’s just something so menial about peeling potatoes that I, and any other cook I know, will rapidly pass on that particular task to anyone else at hand, be they a willing child, a patient friend, or Ruby the scullery maid from “Upstairs Downstairs”.  Nonetheless, with every scrape of the vegetable peeler I told myself that soon others would be doing this for me while I swanned about in my office, possibly wearing a chef’s jacket studded with Swarowski crystals. And epaulets. Epaulets are right for a Prince.

The potatoes peeled, I then set about the far more entertaining task of slicing them into the requisite paper-thin slivers. I had a kitchen mandolin to hand. Working with a mandolin is always fun, and a tad suspenseful, in a “will I lose a digit or sever an artery” kind of way. It is also, of course, extremely fast, so in what seemed like no time at all I had a bounty of potato slices soaking in cold water to remove the starch. This also is a necessary step. Any excess starch would prevent the potatoes from crisping, and that half hour they needed to soak simply left me with more time to day-dream about serving my chips to friends, the chips going viral (in the appropriate rather than “pathogen” way of course), and what I would stud my epaulets with if my jacket already had Swarowski crystals.

Reality began to seep in once the potatoes slivers had soaked for the appropriate time. Now they had to be dried. A damp potato sliver, you see (and more to the point, feel), is a spitting mad potato sliver once it hits hot oil. So each sliver had to be laid out on paper towels, and then covered with another layer of paper towels, in order for any vestige of moisture to be eradicated. If you’ve just sliced a kilo of potatoes paper-thin, this requires a vast amount of surface space, alongside enough paper towels for you to feel that you’ve personally contributed to global deforestation. The sight of all these potato wafers scattered about the kitchen ( on the table, the counters, spare shelves…) was beginning to unnerve me, but unless I switched courses and decided to throw together a massive dauphinoise for no good reason at what was swiftly becoming a lateish hour, I had to plow on.

Not having the candy thermometer that most recipes called for, I couldn’t wait for the oil  in my deep pan to reach the requisite exact 350 degrees Fahrenheit, so instead I opted for the “test a slice method”, wherein, according to the online guidance I had chosen, one looks for a chip that is “bubbling briskly, but not too briskly. You don’t want the chip to brown immediately.” Satisfied that my first chip was bubbling away without getting an instant tan, I added the rest of the first batch and watched them sizzle away for the suggested three minutes a side, at which point they were allegedly ready to be fished out and left to dry on wire cookie racks.

Which of course meant making space amongst the drying raw potatoes for the drying cooked potatoes before you get on with the next batch. The problem was finding said space when the kitchen already looked like a potato infirmary. I had planned enough ahead for one batch of chips, thinking that a moment or two on the rack would elicit instantly crisp chips ready to be salted and dumped in a bowl for munching on as I carried on with the next batch. I was even rather looking forward to a warm, crisp “crisp” or two. But I had neglected to fully grasp one essential aspect of making homemade potato chips.

They don’t actually go crispy until they cool down. If ever.

My urge to get rich, and get rich now sadly impeded me from thinking clearly and slowing the whole process down so I could wait a half hour or so between batches to see what worked and what didn’t. Theoretically, this would have meant only one flabby batch, and then a whole series of batches laying resplendently golden and crunchy on their wire racks. But sadly I was too caught up in Mitty-esque dreams of a Getty-esque future.

So my first batch, golden though they appeared, remained stubbornly flabby, and more than a tad greasy, even after they’d reached room temperature. I discovered this midway through cooking the second batch, at which point I’d already switched another load of potato beds for potato racks, and was beginning to feel on a bit of a rack myself. Clearly, I had to cook the second batch for longer, and look out for the apparently tell-tale blisters of puffiness within the chip that appear if it’s going to crisp properly. Said blisters did appear, only to sag like a lanced boil once I scooped them out of the oil. And the chips were about as “crisp” as a rainy weekend in the Tropics.

I won’t bore you with the full details of each subsequent batch, but suffice to say that by batch 3 I had learned that potato chips, when browned, taste burnt even if they don’t look burnt. By batch 4 I learned that burning chips taints the oil, so that even if you haven’t burned batch 4, they still taste burnt.  Batch 5 taught me that new oil, and cooking the chips faster produces the exact same result as batch 4, and batch 6 just left me with deeply poisonous thoughts about this particular member of the Deadly Nightshade family.

By this point, surrounded  as I was by burnt or unburnt, yet uniformly flabby chips, my thoughts of Grace of Monaco turned equally dark. I began to doubt whether Her Serene Highness was quite so serene when faced with such stubbornly flaccid chips as I.  Especially if oil kept splattering her gorgeous complexion like it was splattering my less-than gorgeous visage. Worse, what if the tales her friends told of her making these chips long after she’d become royalty were also apocryphal? What if she really just swanked it by the pool in her kaftan and tiara as sundry Monegasque Minions manned the pans? While I couldn’t hold on to that thought for long (it’s like those tales of her being a bit of a serial shagger before she married- you just don’t want to think it of her), I did suddenly start to contemplate, whilst carrying on with batch 7 in a grumpily determined manner, whether the famous tale of the origin of the potato chip was relevant to my efforts.

That story holds that on August 24th 1853, in a restaurant named Moon’s Lake House in Saratoga Springs, New York.

A customer complained about his fried potatoes being a touch over-cooked and seasoned. According to this legend, the resident cook, a man named George Crum, who had a less than sunny disposition and a distinctly cloudy view of customer service, was so incensed at the customer’s complaint that when the dish was sent back, he sliced the potatoes thinner, cooked them for longer, and wildly over-salted them. To everyone’s surprise, the customer was delighted, and thus the potato chip was born. Now recipes for sliced fried potatoes predate this story, and many (not least Crum’s own sister, who claimed the credit for herself) have come forward to discredit it, but it’s a good story.

And it was relevant to me because chips were clouding my disposition too. As each batch failed, and I was getting progressively more tired and hungry, I searched about the kitchen for a something to snack on while I waited for my, well, snack. Did I want an apple? Perhaps a banana? Just a bite to tide me over.  Then I realized that what I really wanted right now was a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos.

And suddenly it was as if I was in some sort Damascene kitchen moment. As batch 7 sizzled away into blackened bits, my mind sizzled with the  new-found knowledge that in all my enthusiasm for making the perfect homemade potato chip, I had left out the most important ingredient. And that ingredient was hunger.

Oh I hungered for success in my challenge, and for vaulting success beyond that, but I don’t actually hunger for potato chips. I like them, they’re fine. But I don’t love them. I never actually buy them unless none of my many more preferred snacks is available in the shop. I far prefer the crunch of a corn chip, and the flavors too, regardless of what synthetic process brought them to my taste buds.  More than any chip, I love almost any kind of salted nut. And I’m already more than adept at popping corn without the aid of a microwave if I want to much on something  salty while watching a documentary about the secret lives of the Grimaldis. If I do opt for a potato-based snack product, it’s invariably a can of Salted Pringles. And they aren’t even really potato chips. They’re made in part from potato flour, but that perfect mouth (and dip-scooping) shape, and perfect crispness has not sprung directly from the potato itself.

So I had just wasted a kilo of potatoes, a litre of oil, a forest’s worth of  paper towels, and several hours of my time, just to prove a point. I had felt the need to prove to myself, and eventually to others, that I could make my own potato chips, whether I actually wanted them or not.

Now setting yourself challenges as a cook and foodie is of course a great thing. It’s a fantastic moment when you’ve learned to cook the food you love all by yourself, especially if it’s a perilously complicated dish.. It’s perhaps an even more fantastic moment when you can share that new-found ability with people you also love. Who of us hasn’t looked round a table of people gorging themselves on a repast of your making, and felt a little tingle of pride? But it’s a good idea to make sure that, when you set yourself that culinary challenge, your motives are as clean as your hands.

Making food, be it a majestic feast or a humble snack, is really rather pointless when it doesn’t also involve hunger for that food, and at least a little bit of love.  And really I’m absolutely convinced that Princess Grace loved making her potato chips. How nice for her to be loving and generous without having to don that tiara first. Tiaras can be quite heavy, you know. And great foodstuffs quite often come from happy accidents. George Crum may have been an irascible fellow, but he accidentally made someone very happy indeed, assuming that story isn’t just a load of old chips.

So as I set about clearing up the awful mess I’d made in the kitchen, I thought again of Grace, and how her homemade chips were an act of grace, really. And as my churlishness faded away, I was left with a little reward.  I popped one last chip into my mouth as I swept the last batch into the bin, and it was good.  Not perfect, but light, and crisp, and denuded of grease. So I had done it. I had made one good chip, and that was more than enough for me. I knew that I’d probably never repeat it. Beyond the effort, and time, and paper towels, all of which I would willingly sacrifice again for a better epicurean  cause, I knew that homemade potato chips had been my stuffed mushroom.

I still have ambitions, though. I may never get a prince or be a prince, but I still want those epaulets. And some Cool Ranch Doritos.