When Melissa was growing up in Tacoma, Washington, she’d walk to the corner store, where she’d pick up a corn dog and a bag of jo jos, a term for soft potato wedges with the skin left on. Researcher Barry Popik has dug up a story that may explain the origin of the name jo jos, also spelled jojos or jo-jos. However you spell it and whatever the origin, this food name is heard primarily in the northern United States, from Washington to New York State. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “JoJo Potato Wedges”
Hello there. You have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Melissa from Hysteria, California.
Hi, Melissa. Welcome.
What can we do for you?
I’m calling actually because I’m originally from Washington State, Tacoma, Washington.
And one of the things that we had on the corner of our block was a corner store.
So we literally had like a roll of houses on the corner.
There was a store, like a little liquor store type.
And my mom would let us walk down there.
She had six kids, and she’d give us a few dollars each, and we’d go down there.
We’d get some corn dogs and a bag of JoJo’s each.
And it was about a dollar for, like, you know, maybe like 10 JoJo’s.
And when I became an adult and I’m in California and I’ll go to the grocery store and I’ll ask for JoJo’s,
the people that I’m with will always look at me like, what?
But the person giving me the JoJo’s always gives them to me.
They always go straight for the potato wedges.
They know what I’m talking about.
But it seems like I’ve asked so many people.
No one in California knows what JoJo’s are.
A lot of our listeners don’t know what JoJo’s are.
You’re going to have to explain, Melissa.
Okay, so JoJo’s are potato wedges.
They’re just potatoes.
To me, french fries are french fries.
But when they’re a little thicker, they’re potato wedges.
But that’s JoJo’s to me.
So for you, do JoJo’s have the skin on the wedges?
They do.
And are they batter fried?
They might even be baked.
Because they’re not like fried chicken or anything like that.
Yeah, they’re pretty soft.
They’re soft, but can you see the skin?
Can you see the surface of the potato, or have they been dipped in flour and then fried?
No, no flour.
Yeah, you can see the surface.
Okay, so they’re sort of like steak fries.
Well, we know something about the story about why they’re called JoJo potatoes,
at least we think we do.
There’s a word researcher by the name of Barry Poppik.
He’s a colleague and a friend of the show.
You can find his work at barrypoppick.com.
And he’s looked into this term, and he reached out to a man named Brad French,
who now owns a line of breading for food called Flavor Crisp.
And the story that Brad French tells is that in the early 1960s,
there was a food trade show in Chicago,
and there was a line of equipment owned and operated by the Flavor Crisp Company,
where they were frying up fish and chicken to show off their fryers.
And in between the fish and chicken, they would just throw in potatoes to cleanse the flavor of the oil.
And they would just pull the potatoes out and kind of set them aside to discard them
because they considered them just like garbage and trash.
But what would happen is people coming by would eat the potatoes,
and then they would say, hey, what are these potatoes called?
Thinking that they were part of the food that was meant to be eaten.
They were actually just trash.
And one of the salesmen supposedly just blurted out JoJo’s instead of calling them junk or trash or garbage.
And so they started making those potatoes a thing, breading them.
And they figured out later that you could quarter a russet potato and cook them with chicken and it’d be done at the same time as chicken.
And so the JoJo potatoes became a thing started by the Flavor Crisp Company.
And so they became kind of established with the Flavor Crisp brand,
and you can find JoJo potatoes here and there throughout the northern part of the United States now,
from Washington State over to New York State.
And how are they spelled on those menus?
Usually J-O, J-O, sometimes is one word, sometimes with a hyphen.
Oh, wow.
See, every time I’ve said it, I’ve always put an S at the end.
I’ve always just said Jojo.
It’s like I would never say, oh, let’s go get like a Jojo or anything.
Oh, yeah. JoJo’s plural. Sure. Yeah. JoJo’s plural. Definitely. Yeah. Childhood memories.
Yeah. Melissa, thanks for sharing those memories with us. We appreciate it.
Thank you so much.
All right. Take care now. Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
Boy, food and memory are so tied together. Food, language, and memory, right? The threesome right there.
