Herr's Salt & Vinegar Are More Than Just Chips to Me
Welcome to Drunk on Chips. I'm a potato lover whose potato-loving father always kept our snack cabinet stocked with a carefully curated collection of chips. Here, I give you an honest review of a specific bag.
In case you missed the first line of about every spam email received over the past few weeks, The Holidays™ are in full swing. In regard to chips, this means a couple of things. First, I got a chips Advent calendar in the mail from Lay's, and on the second day discovered their Flamin' Hot flavor is pretty damn spicy. Second, it means I'm thinking about my family a lot-or, specifically, the role they played in what ended up as me writing about potato chips on the internet.
My favorite chips are not The Best Flavor, but a flavor that I hold near and dear to my heart. I've mentioned my love for salt and vinegar chips quite often in this column, but out of all the brands and all the varying interpretations of this staple flavor, none makes me quite as happy as a big white bag of Herr's Salt & Vinegar.
Our family vacations as a kid were to my Uncle Joe's house in Linwood, New Jersey. We'd often wait 'til my folks were out of work, and then start our seven-hour drive from Pittsburgh toward the coast, often arriving sometime around 2 a.m. When we got there, at least a few people were up, one of them always being Uncle Joe. My mom would go to bed, and maybe one of my cousins would stay up and hang out, but dad and Uncle Joe would shoot pool into the wee hours of the morning, drinking beer and snacking. I'll always remember the first time the stinging stench emerged from that white bag of family-sized Herr's Salt & Vinegar. Uncle Joe was equipped with a bag, and asked if I'd ever had them. I said no, but gave them a shot, thus changing my world.
It wasn't just on vacation at Uncle Joe's that I'd indulge in this intimidating flavor. Either just before or sometime right after, my whole family caught the bug, because not only did my parents make it a constant on our grocery list, but also you'd be hard pressed not to find a bag at any family gathering. Whether it was Christmas at Gram and Pop's or Thanksgiving at Uncle Hack and Aunt Tanis's, I knew one way or another I'd get my hands on a few of my all-time favorites. Even into the last few years of his life, Pop, upon my arrival to his house, would let it be known that there was a white bag-albeit already dipped into-behind his bar for me.
Why do I love them so much? I'm not sure it has all that much to do with how they taste, to be honest. I've been conditioned to handle their extreme seasoning, which makes many people pucker up when I wax poetic about them IRL. When I talk about these being my go-to chips, some even question the credibility of me being allowed to write this column.
In that regard, I'll tell ya something: Chip flavors are like music. There is no good or bad, it's all subjective. I might not give a single shit about some obscure artist a music junkie tells me I have to check out, but if it makes them happy I'm not going to question that artist's Goodness. And so if I had to think objectively, I'd say-and have said-that All-Dressed is the best flavor of chips out there. But if you ask me what my favorites are, that white bag immediately stands out in my mind.
When I eat Herr's Salt & Vinegar chips, I don't think about the impressive size of some of the chips Herr's is able to fit into a bag, unbroken. I don't think about the excessively caked on, malty combination of salt and vinegar that absolutely destroys a layer of gum tissue every time you eat them. I think about Uncle Joe shooting pool in Linwood. I think about my dad coming home from Giant Eagle, and seeing that red lettering pop through the blue plastic grocery bag. I think about the closet just outside Uncle Hack and Aunt Tanis's kitchen, where I knew to find them. And I think about the excitement in Pop's eyes when he let me know he had something for me behind the bar.
My family gatherings have changed a lot through the years. On my dad's side, my 16 cousins and I have all grown up and scattered across the country, many of us having pretty big families of our own now. More than 30 of us used to pack into Gram & Pop's humble home, but as life happened for all of us, hearing "I'll be Home for Christmas" began to take on the ethos of the song by the same name. Despite all of the changes, I think this year's Christmas Eve dinner will have a pretty good showing back in Pittsburgh. Pop won't be there; he died in 2015. My dad won't be there either; he moved to Texas and isn't able to make it this year. (It's cool, though. FaceTime exists, and we did this this year.)
But everyone will be there in spirit-Gram and Pop included. If not via our traditional Polish Wigilia-adjacent meal, then at least through that nostalgia-inducing white bag of salt and vinegar potato chips.
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