According to urban legend, the potato chip was accidentally invented in 1853 by an irritated chef. He was George Crum, the son of an African-American father and Native-American mother, who was working as a chef one summer in Saratoga Springs, New York. A customer in the restaurant where Crum worked complained that his French-fried potatoes were too thick and soft and sent them back to the kitchen. To teach the customer a lesson, Crum allegedly sliced a new batch of potatoes as thinly as he possibly could, fried the slices until they were hard and crunchy, and then doused them with salt. But far from being angry, the customer ended up loving the new dish, and thus the potato chip was born! Saratoga Springs was famous at the time for its natural hot springs, some of which are still in operation today. Soon the potato chips, originally known as 'Saratoga chips' or 'potato crunches,' became very popular. With the profits he'd made, Crum opened his own restaurant, where every table had its own basket of chips. The chips remained a local delicacy until the Prohibition era. This is when an entrepreneur named Herman Lay popularized the product throughout the Southeastern United States. However, not everyone believes that George Crum was the inventor of the potato chip. These skeptics say that certain cookbooks from the early 1800s, such as William Kitchiner's The Cook's Oracle and N.K.M. Lee's The Cook's Own Book, described recipes for very similar potato dishes-the only difference is that they weren't called 'potato chips.'