ISSUE 28, POTATOES, Part 3: Cary D. Moon's Lake House--Where America Learned to Love the Potato Chip
Popularizing the Saratoga Chip
Moon’s Lake House—the First Temple of the Potato Chip
The Saratoga caterer who popularized the Potato Chip (Saratoga Chip) in the 1850s and made it a culinary fixture, first in the resort and then in the nation, Cary D. Moon presided over the “Lake House” from 1854 to 1884. On the eve of the Civil War this wooden Greek Revival tavern on the road by Lake Saratoga became famous for game and wine dinners.
As early as 1856 Moon’s “fried potatoes” appeared in print as one of the culinary attractions of Saratoga. Their first mention took place in “A Trip to the North,” a New York Herald Story of July 30, 1856: “There has been no event worth notice except a Sunday dinner party at the Lake House, where numerous trout, woodcock and fried potatoes were got up splendidly, and eaten up voraciously.” By the next year newspapers spoke of the venue and dish as established attractions—“the Lake House—where ‘all the world’ go to drive, or to dine on the famous ‘fried potatoes.’” By August of 1857 the famous African-American caterer George Downing (later to be the steward of the U. S. Congressional Dining Room) had adopted the dish, serving it a Newport fete, rebranded as his own creation: “potatoes fried a la Downing, that is to say, sliced so thin and cooked so crispily without being browned in the least as to become, as an epicure tells me, the very poetry of fried potatoes.”
Moon’s Lake House enjoyed a situation that inspired rhapsody in visitors: “A hotel almost shut out from the light of day by surrounding trees crowns the top of the abrupt hill that descends to Saratoga Lake. The very fairies and nymphs, who gave delight to the gods in their ambrosial valleys, would envy such a spot.” Moon’s potatoes inspired a similar delight: “Fried potatoes are an institution specially created so at the Lake, and so long as they last the moon, our particular friend, Moon, the proprietor of the Lake House, we hope will continue to shine. Imagine, dear reader, if you can, the largest and best of potatoes slice so fine and thin that it would be no detriment to the rays of the sun passing to the earth—imagine them cooked and served up before you, hot and crisp, and so delicious that a monk would die in a delirium of epicurean joy at the first mouthful, and then you can form some faint conception of how palateable and delicious they are. Strange as it may seem, no visitor ever mentions the Lake without mentioning potatoes.” (September 3, 1859)
The potatoes served as the chief adornment of a table d’hote that defined Saratoga resort cuisine: “We must not forget those miraculous dinners which run the gamut of delicacies, from fried potatoes up to green figs, the intermediates being trout fresh from the pond, bass boiled to a nicety, woodcock, snipe, quail, partridge, in fact game in such endless variety that Audubon himself would take a week, to describe them ornithologically. Then there are fresh figs, pineapples, tamarinds, pomegranates, lemons, peaches, apricots—in brief, all the gifts of Pomona.” (July 26, 1862). In Spring of 1865 the reputation of Moon’s table brought the king of American restaurateurs, Lorenzo Delmonico, to the Lake House: “after a natural dinner of green turtle, lake bass, trout and other fish, game in the shape of woodcock, partridge, quail, frogs, all washed down with delectable Carte d’or and Las d’or, &c., and fried potatoes celebrated for their exquisiteness—(Moon is said to have made a fortune on his fried potatoes alone)—Delmonico . . . declared that Moon had outdone him.” Almost immediately Saratoga fried potatoes became a fixture on Delmonico’s menu. At Moon’s crisps were served piping hot in a foot long white paper cornucopia. They could also be procured cold.
Other of Saratoga’s dining rooms imitated Moon’s, offering their versions of fried potatoes—The United States Hotel as early as 1858, and Myer’s at the Lake in the later 1860s, but none could achieve the proper lightness and crispness. When they had become a general offering of the resort—circa 1870—they ceased to be called Moon’s fried potatoes and were called “chip-fried potatoes.” In the late 1860s a journalistic game of ‘securing the secret’ commenced. The New York Herald revealed one dimension in June of 1869: “the first process before frying is to take all the starch out of the slice of potato by soaking it in a succession of many waters until it becomes so transparent that one can read the editorials of the Bohemian New York papers through it.” In 1870 the Albany Evening Journal spoke further on the subject: “The papers should be cut to a wafer like thinness, and immersed in cold water from four to six hours; then dried quickly by placing them between cloths, and dropped separately into hot lard; stir constantly with the skimmer; when done the lard will stop simmering, and the potatoes should be placed in a cullender that the grease may drip away; afterward salt to the taste.” (July 29, 1870). The heat of the lard was an important consideration. Later revelations—the widely republished “The Secret of Saratoga Fried Potatoes” in July 1874—followed the Albany account in most particulars.
The wide republication of the recipe in 1874 led to the first attempts at large-scale production. The bicentennial celebration of 1876 in Philadelphia saw ‘Saratoga Chips’ featured as an indigenous American food . By 1878 newspapers reported “The manufacture of Saratoga fried potatoes, or chips, as they are now called, has become quite a business. Heretofore this luxury was rarely found outside of a few hotels and first-class restaurants, but loads of potatoes are now sold every week for the production of this article, and Saratoga fried potatoes are to be found at all first-class groceries, and are on the tables at most of the summer hotels at the mountains and seaside.
In 1879 Cary B. Moon became deathly ill. His long convalescence determined him to turn over management of the Lake House to others. He hired H. S. Thomas to be his manager. Upon Moon’s retirement in 1884, the Lake House was taken over entirely by Hiram S. Thomas, an African-American caterer who had come to public notice in Washington, D. C. during the Grant Administration. He would use his connection with the Lake House at the end of his life to claim the invention of the Saratoga Chip.
The Lake House burnt to the ground in 1893, the same year in which Moon died of heart failure at the age of eighty two. Obituaries lauded him as the creator of “Moon’s fried potatoes” and a signal figure in the resort’s history.
Sources: “A Trip to the North,” New York Herald 7274 (July 30, 1856), 8.“Curious Story Afloat—Robert Schuyles Reported to be Alive, and in Saratoga,” Boston Herald (August 11, 1857), 4. “Newport,” New York Evening Post 55 (August 12, 1857), 2. “Trout Dinners and Fried Potatoes,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (September 3, 1859), 9. “Moon’s Lake House, Lake Saratoga, N.Y.,” (July 26, 1862), 11. “Saratoga Lake-a Fortune from Fried Potatoes,” New York Herald 10491 (May 20, 1865), 2. “Our Watering Places, “ New York Herald” 34, 165 (June 14, 1869), 8. “A New Kind of Confectionery,” Cleveland Plain Dealer (September 28, 1870), 5. “From Saratoga, Albany Evening Journal (July 29, 1870), 2. “The Secret of Saratoga Fried Potatoes,” Philadelphia Inquirer (July 8, 1874), 4. “New Article in the Groceries,” (July 10, 1878), 6. “The Parting Glass,” Troy Times 34, 8 (September 19, 1889), 5. “Famous Roadhouse Burned,” Boston Herald (May 12, 1893), 3.
A shorter version of this sketch was published in my 2017 book, The Culinarians