Peel large Potatoes, slice them about a quarter of an inch thick, or 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. Take care that your fat and frying pan are quite clean; put it on a quick fire, watch it, and as soon as the lard boils, and is still, put in the slices of potato, and keep moving them till they are crisp. Take them up and lay them to drain on a sieve: send them up with a very little salt sprinkled over them.
WAS IT GEORGE CRUM…
In the 1850s, Crum was a “tough old codger,” part African American and part Native American, who was the cook at a restaurant called Moon’s Lake House on Saratoga Lake in upstate New York. He had a hot temper and hated it when people criticized his cooking. As C. R. Gibbs writes in The Afro-American Inventor:
The few who did complain and returned their orders to the kitchen were rewarded with the most indigestible substances the chef could concoct. His somewhat irascible nature made him commit mayhem on many a returned meal. It pleased him to watch their reaction, which ranged from disbelief to a hurried departure.
According to popular legend, that’s what happened one day in 1853 when a customer sent back an order of fried potatoes sliced “very thin” because they weren’t sliced thin enough, and then sent back a second plate when these, too, weren’t thin enough to his liking. That did it! Crum grabbed a potato peeler and peeled a potato directly into a skillet filled with hot oil. He fried the paper-thin slices until they were too crispy to pierce with a fork, which was how fried potatoes were usually eaten, and sprinkled them with so much salt as to make them inedible (or so he thought). Then he sent his fried insults back out to the customer, who ate every chip…and then ordered a second helping. Why fight it? Crum added “potato crunches,” later called “Saratoga Chips,” to the menu. They became one of Moon’s Lake House’s signature dishes, and the first potato chips sold commercially instead of being made at home.
One more thing to worry about: If you were to inhale a pea, it could sprout into a new pea plant inside your lung.
…OR CRUM’S SISTER, CATHERINE WICKS
The George Crum tale has long been the official story of how potato chips were invented, but in the 1930s some members of Crum’s extended family claimed in interviews that his sister, Catherine Wicks, was the true inventor. According to this version of events, she invented them by accident, with a little help from George: Wicks was peeling a potato near the stove when a piece fell into a pan of hot fat. She fished the fried peel out and set it on a plate. That’s when Crum walked by and popped the morsel into his mouth, not realizing it was destined for the garbage. Yummy! “We’ll have plenty of these,” he said.
Just as Mexican restaurants put out tortilla chips for customers, Moon’s Lake House began putting bowls of Saratoga Chips out for its customers. They proved so popular that owner Cary Moon began selling “Original Saratoga Chips” as takeout food, so that people who craved them could have them even when they weren’t dining in the restaurant. Moon served them in rolled-up paper cones to people who wanted to eat them right away, and in takeout boxes for customers to take home.
LAURA SCUDDER
In the early 1920s, Laura Scudder and her husband Charles owned a gas station in Monterey Park in Southern California. When a car Charles was working under fell on him and left him disabled, Laura took over the running of the business. To boost profits, she began making and selling potato chips. Scudder later sold the gas station and focused on making chips full time. In those days potato chips were sold in bulk, usually in barrels or bins, to grocery stores. When a grocery customer wanted some chips, the grocer scooped chips from the barrel into a brown paper bag. The customer took them home and typically warmed them in the oven before serving them.
Have you ever heard the expression “bottom of the barrel”? When the chips at the top of a barrel were scooped out, the chips farther down often got crushed and became stale. Nobody wanted these chips, so they were thrown out.
Scudder wanted to find a better method of packaging her potato chips, and hit on the idea of making sealed moisture-proof bags out of wax paper. Each night she sent the employees of her potato chip factory home with sheets of wax paper to iron into potato chip bags. The following morning the employees brought the finished bags to work, and filled them with the potato chips they made that day, and ironed them shut to keep the chips fresh. Filling the bags with extra air (eventually nitrogen gas, to increase shelf life) helped to cushion the chips against crushing.
No kidding: Ephebiphobics have a fear of young people.
Another innovation of Scudder’s: using two bags inside of a larger bag, so that customers could eat half of their potato chips without the other half going stale. Scudder’s bags turned potato chips into a mass-market snack food; by the time she sold her company for $6 million in 1957, more than half of all the potato chips sold in California were Laura Scudder’s Potato Chips.
JOE “SPUD” MURPHY
Until the 1950s, potato chips came in one flavor—potato. That’s when Murphy, founder of Tayto’s Crisps potato chip company in the Republic of Ireland, developed the first mass-production technique for adding flavoring to potato chips as they were being made. Ireland’s first flavored chips were Cheese & Onion and Salt & Vinegar. The first flavor in the United States: barbecue.
FRED BAUR AND ALEXANDER LIEPA
Laura Scudder may have liked her potato chip bags full of air, but there’s nothing more frustrating that opening a big bag of chips and seeing how much air, and how few chips, are actually in there. Potato chips are also greasy, and even in the most carefully handled bags of chips, plenty will still be broken. The consumer products company Procter & Gamble saw these flaws as an opportunity: they figured that if they could make less greasy, unbroken chips and package them in a container that wasn’t full of air, the public would eat them up. In the late 1950s they assigned a chemist named Fred Baur to come up with just such a chip. He nearly succeeded, inventing a chip made from dehydrated, processed potato dough. He gave his chips a saddle shape that allowed the chips to be stacked inside a specially built can, which he also invented.
But Baur’s chips tasted terrible, and his work was shelved until the mid-1960s, when P&G assigned Alexander Liepa the task of improving their flavor. He finally succeeded and the chips were introduced under the brand name Pringles (named for Pringle Drive in Cincinnati) in 1967. They were marketed as “potato chips” until 1975, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration ruled that they were not actually chips. Since then they’ve been sold as “crisps.” (Fred Baur was so proud of his Pringles can that when he died in 2008, his body was cremated and his ashes were buried inside a Pringles can, purchased by his family at Walgreens on the way to the funeral home. “My siblings and I briefly debated what flavor to use, but I said, ‘Look, we need to use the original,’ ” Baur’s son Larry told Time magazine in 2008.)
China used more cement between 2011 and 2013 than the U.S. did in the entire 20th century.
STAR WARS, STARRING
JODIE FOSTER
Some roles are so closely associated with a specific actor that it’s hard to imagine he or she wasn’t the first choice. But it happens all the time. Can you imagine, for example…
CHER as MORTICIA ADDAMS (The Addams Family—1991)
When word got out around Hollywood that producer Scott Rudin was making a big-screen adaptation of The Addams Family, a number of actresses wanted the part of the mysterious, elegant, black-clad Morticia Addams, memorably played in the 1960s TV series by Carolyn Jones. Cher, having recently won an Academy Award for her role in Moonstruck, reportedly relentlessly pursued Rudin for the part. While she did have the right look for the character, Rudin didn’t think she was quite right for it. Besides, he already someone in mind—someone he’d had in mind for the part from the beginning: Anjelica Huston.
HUGH JACKMAN as JAMES BOND (Casino Royale—2006)
In 2002 Pierce Brosnan starred in
Die Another Day, his fourth outing as British superspy James Bond. Then he walked away from the extremely popular franchise, sending both the British film industry and Hollywood into a frenzy to find the next actor to play 007. The relatively unknown actor Daniel Craig got the gig, but he wasn’t the producers’ first choice. They really wanted Hugh Jackman, at the time best known for portraying Wolverine in the X-Men movies. But the Australian actor turned down the chance to be Bond. Reason: He thought the last few 007 movies hadn’t been very good. “I just felt at the time that the scripts had become so unbelievable and crazy, and I felt like they needed to become grittier and real,” Jackman later told Variety. When he found out he would get no creative input into the films, he passed.
SEAN “PUFFY” COMBS as a BOTTLE OF ALCOHOL (Sausage Party—2016)
Combs is primarily a rapper. But he also acts on occasion, so actor/writer Seth Rogen recruited Combs for a small role in his raunchy 2016 animated comedy Sausage Party. The movie is set in a grocery store at night when there are no humans around and the products come to life. Combs agreed to play a bottle of Courvoisier cognac (a nod to the 2002 Busta Rhymes hit “Pass the Courvoisier, Part II,” which features Combs, billed as “P. Diddy”). Amazingly, Combs backed out of the movie when he found out that he’d only be providing the voice of an animated character. In other words, Combs thought it was a live-action movie, and that he’d be wearing a Courvoisier costume. Rogen instead used SNL star Bill Hader to voice a bottle of whisky.
Pick-me-up: Until 1948, 7-Up contained lithium, a powerful antidepressant.
EMMA WATSON as MIA (La La Land—2016)
It took writer-director Damien Chazelle six years to get La La Land made. The musical about jazz and romance in modern-day Hollywood wasn’t seen as very commercial, and it took Chazelle’s 2014 movie Whiplash getting nominated for a Best Picture Oscar to get studios interested. Before La La Land went into production, Chazelle lined up two big stars to play the lead roles of pianist Sebastian and actress Mia: Miles Teller (the star of Whiplash) and Emma Watson (Hermione in the Harry Potter movies). But it took too long for the project to start. By the time production got going, both Teller and Watson had moved on to other projects. So Ryan Gosling came onboard to play Sebastian, and Emma Stone played Mia. Good move: She won an Academy Award for her performance.
JODIE FOSTER as PRINCESS LEIA ORGANA (Star Wars—1977)
Carrie Fisher was just 20 years old when she took on the iconic role of Princess Leia in the first Star Wars movie. That’s young, but not as young as the actress she edged out for the part: 14-year-old Jodie Foster, who’d just been nominated for an Oscar for Taxi Driver. In 2015 Fisher told the Daily Beast that final casting came down to her, Foster, and Amy Irving.
CHARLES BRONSON as SUPERMAN (Superman—1978)
Bronson is most associated with the role of Paul Kersey in the Death Wish movies, a disillusioned architect who gets medieval on the world after his wife is killed by street thugs, and starts cleaning up New York’s mean streets by brutally killing as many random criminals as possible. The Death Wish series was extremely popular, which won Bronson some consideration when producers were casting the big-budget Superman movie set for release in 1978. But Bronson was well over 50 at the time and, in addition, producers thought he looked “too earthy.”
“If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself; if it be a lie, laugh at it.”
—Epictetus
Sea monkeys breathe through their feet.
UNCLE JOHN’S
PAGE OF LISTS
Random bits of information from the BRI’s bottomless files.
First 4 Communications Satellites
1. Sputnik 1 (1957, USSR)
2. Project SCORE (1958, USA)
3. TIROS-1 (1960, USA)
4. Echo 1 (1960, USA)
7 Items Banned from Disney Parks
1. Selfie sticks
2. Wrapped gifts
3. Folding chairs
4. Drones
5. Pets
6. Balloons
7. Straws
6 Vegetables That Are Varieties of the Wild Mustard Plant
1. Brussels sprouts
2. Cabbage
3. Kale
4. Broccoli
5. Cauliflower
6. Kohlrabi
11 Items That Often Contain Cow Byproducts
1. Asphalt
2. Drywall
3. Tires
4. Paint
5. White sugar
6. Lipstick
7. Fireworks
8. Crayons
9. Dice
10. Piano keys
11. Surgical sutures
5 Country Songs About Drinkin’
1. “You Look Like I Need a Drink” (Justin Moore)
2. “Chug-a-Lug” (Roger Miller)
3. “Red Solo Cup” (Toby Keith)
4. “The Whiskey Ain’t Workin’ ” (Travis Tritt)
5. “There’s a Tear in My Beer” (Hank Williams Jr.)
4 Things Lay’s Potato Chips Are Called Abroad
1. Walker’s (UK)
2. Sabritas (Mexico)
3. Tapuchips (Israel)
4. Chipsy (Egypt)
8 Rap Names for Insane Clown Posse co-founder Joseph William Utsler
1. Shaggy 2 Dope
2. Guy Gorfey
3. Gweedo
4. Ham’d Burglah
5. Mr. Club
6. Southwest Strangla
7. Bazooka Joey
8 Stretch Nuts
First 8 Countries to Celebrate the New Year
1. Samoa
2. Tonga
3. Fiji
4. New Zealand
5. Australia
6. Japan
7. South Korea
8. North Korea
If your eyes were digital cameras, they’d be 576 megapixel cameras.
MOUTHING OFF
WE ARE NOT A FAN
Doesn’t everybody like Star Wars and the Beatles? Apparently not.
“As entertainment, the film would benefit from the deletions.”
—John C. Flinn Sr., Variety, on Gone With the Wind
“Coffee isn’t my cup of tea.”
—Samuel Goldwyn, movie producer
“I think he was a bad man, a man who forced the country into an unnecessary war and conducted it with great inhumanity.”
—Lyon Gardiner Tyler, historian, on Abraham Lincoln
“Mother Teresa has consoled and supported the rich and powerful, allowing them all manner of indulgence, while preaching obedience and resignation to the poor.”
—Christopher Hitchens
“I DON’T LIKE PIZZA. I NEVER HAVE AND PROBABLY NEVER WILL. THE EXCESSIVE GREASE AND SHEER QUANTITY OF CHEESE IS OFF-PUTTING, AND IT MAKES ME NAU SEOUS.”
—Marisa Guido, Teen Vogue
“The only way that Star Wars could have been interesting was through its visual imagination and special effects. Both are unexceptional.”
—Stanley Kauffman, the New Republic
“The rhino is now more or less extinct, and its not because of global warming or shrinking habitats. It’s because of Beyoncé’s handbags.”
—Morrissey
“The Beatles are not merely awful. They are so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art that they qualify as crowned heads of anti-music.”
—William F. Buckley Jr.
“Christmas is a baby shower that went totally overboard.”
—Andy Borowitz, the New Yorker
“Strip Star Wars of its often striking images and its highfalutin scientific jargon, and you get a story, characters, and dialogue of overwhelming banality.”
—John Simon, New York magazine
“I don’t care for Seinfeld. I’m bothered by the character of Kramer. I find it hard to watch shows where there is one character that is so obnoxious that no one would hang out with him.”
—Sen
ator Barney Frank
“They were the worst musicians in the world. Paul was the worst bass player I ever heard. And Ringo? Don’t even talk about it.”
—Quincy Jones, music producer, on the Beatles
“The picture leaves one cold, or disturbs one by its paradoxical, unfeeling, and grotesque unconcern for the beholder. This is the group to which Picasso belongs’.’
—Carl Jung
MURDER, HE WROTE
Considering how many texts people send to each other every day, it stands to reason that some of them will get sent to the wrong person. Here’s the story of a wayward text that, if it could be believed, was a matter of life and death.
THE TELLTALE TEXT
In February 2017, a Monroe, Washington, businessman (name not released in news reports) received a disturbing text that was not intended for him. Addressed to someone named Shayne, it read:
Hey Shayne hows it going. You remember you said that you would help me kill my wife. I’m going to take you up on that offer. [Wife’s] life insurance is worth 1 million and if you want a bounes [sic] you can kill [daughter]. Her life insurance is 500k. I go to work 5 in the morning. [Wife] goes to work at 2:00pm so if you can make a robbery gone wrong or make it a accident she works at walmart she gets off at 11 :OO. I’ll split everything with the insurance 50/50. Please call or text me please.
The message could not have been clearer. Luckily for the business owner, he recognized the phone number as one belonging to a former employee, a 42-year-old man named Jeffery Scott Lytle. The business owner reported the text to the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office, which went into action.
JUST THE FACTS
Uncle John's Actual and Factual Bathroom Reader Page 15