Crunch

Rebecca Webb Carranza died recently, aged 98. In the 1940's, she invented one of my favorite snacks - the tortilla chip. The story goes - in the mid 1940's, automated machines would chop up flattened tortillas using a disc-cutter, to pruduce the desired shapes. The scraps from these tortillas were wasted, and apart from their misshapen look, were perfectly edible. So, Rebecca decided to bring some of it home - and for a party of friends, she chopped them into aesthetically pleasing triangular strips, and fried them. These chips were a huge hit, and the tortilla chip was born. This helped set up a large tort chips business, and she was given an awrd in the mid-1990s for innovation in the industry. The award was the Golden Tortilla.