The Contested Origins Of Fried Potato Skins
Once upon a time, fried potato skins were considered to be health food. If you're recalling scooped-out potato halves loaded with bacon, cheese, and sour cream and wondering how that could possibly be, it's because they were originally served without most of that. Or were they?
There's some uncertainty around who created fried potato skins. Unlike the claim to the first Juicy/Jucy Lucy, the honor of being the first establishment to offer fried potato skins isn't an identity-building, sides-taking argument. Instead, it's more of a culinary history curiosity. Even one of the top three contenders for the honor, Richard Melman of Chicago's R.J. Grunts, told Eater, "I don't know if we were first or 10th." It's pretty ambiguous for a restaurant that knows exactly what minute it opened.
As far as it is known, the timeline suggests fried potato skins debuted on the R.J. Grunts menu when it opened (on June 10, 1971, at 11:31 a.m.). The Prime Rib restaurant in Washington, D.C. also claims 1971 as the year the dish hit menus. TGI Fridays claims 1974. It's possible that TGI Fridays got the idea from either establishment mentioned above. It's possible that Prime Rib and R.J. Grunts could have an invisible string tying their discoveries back to a common, unknown genesis. It's possible that not a single one of these people stole the idea from the other, but that — like language, religion, art, and all other major markers of humanity — cooks will naturally develop fried potato skins.
Where did the idea of fried potato skins come from?
As the story goes, Prime Rib got the idea from a regular named Teddy Greenberg, who reportedly asked the chef to put them on the menu. Greenberg got the taste for potato skins from his friend Shirlee S. Rice. Rice got the idea from the chef James Beard during a cooking seminar for a dish called Potatoes Lord Byron, when he commented that the potato skins don't have to go to waste if you season and roast them until crispy.
According to R.J. Grunts' version, Richard Melman's brother read a story about potato skins' nautical history; they were part of a nutritional regiment to defend against illness. This is where the concept of fried potato skins as health food came from and why Melman found a way to put them on the restaurant's menu. Though they were always served simply — and still are — customers would load them up with fixings from the salad bar.
As for TGI Fridays, it says that in 1974 one of its cooks was supposedly making mashed potatoes when he wanted a snack. After frying them, he tossed fried potato skins in TGI Fridays special seasoning and loaded it with cheese and bacon. Regardless of who did it first, this was arguably when the infamous potato skin appetizer as we know and love it first became widely available.
Could fried potato skins date back even further?
If Shirlee S. Rice got the idea from James Beard in 1971 as an off-hand comment, it stands to reason that Beard himself had either developed or was given the idea before 1971. Who really created the first fried potato skin? Possibly the Incas in Peru 1,800 years ago, when potatoes were first cultivated. It's unlikely that fried potato skins are older than domestic cultivation, so let's say the floor is around 200 A.D.
Potatoes were introduced to Europe by Spanish conquistadors in the 1500s, but like the tomato, it was considered poisonous by the masses and didn't catch on as a delicious and sustaining snack. In France circa the 1600s, there was an official edict against potatoes in the town of Besancon, saying, "In view of the fact that the potato is a pernicious substance whose use can cause leprosy, it is hereby forbidden, under pain of fine, to cultivate it." So it's unlikely that fried potato skins came from then or there.
There's said to be a Sicilian recipe from 1835 that properly fries stuffed potatoes: They were filled with a rice, cheese, and egg mixture and then dredged and fried. This feels like the closest written precursor to what TGI Fridays now sells boxed in the freezer aisle — but lacking an author to properly attest its history, the origins of fried potato skins remain contested.