One of the most fun things about the Recipe Tin Project is that you run across recipes you would never have thought to make otherwise. Potato Chip Cookies is certainly one of those. I’ve never had a chip in a cookie, never thought to put a chip into a cookie… until now. And it kind of makes sense, doesn’t it?! After all, sweet and salty is a stellar combo and most things do better with a little crunch. Sometimes the unexpected is just the thing you need.

This recipe card came to me through the Recipe Tin Project, a project where I cook my way through an old recipe tin full of vintage recipes. But you might have already guessed that. It’s chock full of old recipe cards, most of which seem to be from the ’60s and ’70s. I love food history, and the idea is to breathe new life into these recipes from the past and maybe learn a technique or two from them along the way. The recipes come from different people with different handwriting; some have sweet illustrations while others are on plain (often smudged and stained) index cards.

This one is on a lined index card with a vibrant red header and it’s written in easy-to-red black print. (That’s not always the case, trust me.) What I love about this is that someone cared about this recipe enough to protect it in a little plastic sleeve. It’s the only one in the recipe tin that got that kind of treatment and I wonder if it was the recipient or the giver that made that decision. Either way, it means it’s held up well!

Though this recipe doesn’t seem as old to me as some of the other ones. It has more of an 80s vibe with the large modern print and the call for Crisco and potato chips. It also calls for butter, flour, sugar, vanilla… all the usual cookie culprits. As for chips, I went with a ruffled potato chip, though I think a traditional potato chip would probably work fine too.

The dough doesn’t hold together incredibly well so needs a little encouragement, but the card explains that they don’t spread so you can place them closer together than normal on the baking sheet. And I was wondering about that! There’s no leavening agent — no eggs or baking powder or baking soda — but they actually still turn out very tender.

And the verdict? I think they’re good! When we tasted them in the studio (which you can see in the video above), we were getting a weird flavor we couldn’t place. We assumed it was the shortening, but it turns out somebody had accidentally stocked our all-purpose flour bin with another kind of flour and that’s what tasted off to us. But the rest of the cookie worked. The butteriness, the soft crumb, the salty crunch of the cookie… that was all good. So I’d call these a win.