“For many years now, people have been debating the correct term for thin slices of potatoes, cooked until crunchy. Americans call them “potato chips”; the English call them “crisps”. The Irish tend to sit this argument out, because we have our very own special word for the delicacy ... “Taytos”.
One gets the sense, in reading The Story of Tayto, that if we weren’t discussing Joe “Spud” Murphy in the context of crisps, we would be discussing Tayto’s founder in light of another common noun, such is Murphy’s entrepreneurial prowess.
Murphy grew up “in the shadow of the Guinness brewery” in Dublin’s Liberties, where he began his business career selling his father’s scrap wood along the “bustling marketplace” of Thomas Street. It was at the ripe age of 30 that Murphy launched the brand that would become a national treasure, in a two-room premises just steps away from the Moore Street fruit and vegetable market “with a shoestring capital of just £500″. Humble beginnings for the beloved crisps of a notion-averse nation.
The Tayto crisp was announced with an ad in The Irish Times in 1954, where the brand would become a regular poster, issuing apologies and updates via the national press, and even penning a ditty or two. Character, humour and playfulness would prove key to the brand’s success as would its commitment to quality and benevolence towards its loyal staff and customers.
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Those dubious about the potential “stage Irishness” of a book about Tayto crisps, imagining SEO-driven prose littered with terms like “fizzy orange”, “spice bag”, and “who left the immersion on?” will be gleefully surprised to find that popular historian Bobby Aherne has delivered a genuinely entertaining and enlightening book that celebrates the iconic Irish snack.
Crunch: an Ode to Crisps by British journalist and former Financial Times food and drink editor Natalie Whittle lacks the narrative structure of its Tayto counterpart. With prose a little too sensuous for the humble snack, and a penchant for overstatement and oversimplification – a reference to the Irish famine, as caused by the nation’s over-reliance on the crop neatly fits the narrative of a potato-obsessed nation is reductive, to say the least. That said, the book is not without its moments of fun and intrigue and may serve to enlighten the Irish reader of the world of crips, beyond our beloved Tayto.
