Wicks, Catherine 'Kate' Speck

Impact on the world

Worked alongside her brother George Crum as a cook at Moon's Lake House in Saratoga Springs, and was identified by name in her own 1924 obituary as having 'first invented and fried' the dish that became known as the Saratoga Chip, a claim that, while never as widely publicized as her brother's version of events, has been treated by some food historians as at least as credible; she lived to the reported age of 102 or 110, depending on the source, outliving her brother by a decade.

Life & background

Born Catherine Speck to a Black father and a mother of mixed Stockbridge Native American, German, and Spanish heritage, Wicks worked as a cook at Moon's Lake House alongside her brother George Crum during the period the potato chip is said to have originated there in 1853. According to one version of events, while preparing crullers, she accidentally dropped a sliver of potato into hot frying fat and, upon tasting the result, recognized its appeal; her brother's competing, far more widely circulated legend, involving a disgruntled customer and a deliberately spiteful chef, came to dominate popular accounts of the dish's invention during his lifetime. When Wicks died in 1924 at a reported age of either 102 or 110, her obituary explicitly credited her, not her brother, as the one who 'first invented and fried' the famous chips, a claim that surfaced again decades later when her grandson publicly reasserted her role as the dish's true originator in a 1932 newspaper interview.

Sources

1. Saratoga County History Center; BlackPast.org