Who doesn’t like a tasty french fry? The greatest fried potatoes are delicate and steaming on the inside, crispy on the surface, not overly greasy, and adequately salty, making a mound of them the ideal companion to a juicy burger, rare ribeye steak, or pot of steamed mussels.
It would be difficult to find someone who does not enjoy fries. According to UC Davis, the typical American consumes around 40 pounds of French fries per year, while McDonald’s, the world’s largest supplier of fries, sells approximately nine million pounds every day. Indeed, the U.S. According to the USDA, fries account for 25% of all potatoes consumed in the United States.
If you’ve ever eaten a french fry — or if you recall the 2003 “freedom fries” debate — you’ve probably thought about the term. Is it true that French fries are popular all over the world?
Belgium claims to have invented French fries.
If you had assumed the name “french fries” indicates the classic fried potato dish hails from France, we’d understand! Actually, France and Belgium both lay claim to the invention of fried potatoes. Many sources say the crispy spuds were most likely invented in the country’s northeast neighbor, Belgium.
According to lore, the dish was born in Belgium in the winter of 1680, when the fried fish-loving denizens of a city called Namur had to find something else to cook when the local river froze over. Lacking their tiny fish, they substituted potatoes cut in long segments, fried them, and voilà, the birth of the french fry! While some historians have questioned the authenticity of this tale, Belgium has stood firm in its stance that it created french fries, petitioning UNESCO to add the dish to Belgium’s list of cultural treasures on multiple occasions.
Perhaps they are French after all?
Historians question Namur’s fishy origin tale since oil was rare at the time, making it improbable that a large portion of the riches would have been sacrificed on a poor potato. Potatoes were also unknown in that section of Belgium. Cookbooks in France describe fried potatoes as early as 1795, but they were most likely sliced rather than the recognizable stick shape. After returning from France in 1802, Thomas Jefferson is claimed to have served lightly fried potatoes, although the form was not nearly as we know it today.
Herr Krieger, a German-born and Paris-trained cook, was touring from town to town in Belgium in the early 1800s, selling sliced, fried potatoes that he identified as Paris-style fried potatoes, according to Belgian scholar Pierre Leclercq. As a savvy entrepreneur, Krieger began chopping his potatoes into sticks to cook them faster around 1845 – might this be the true origin? Born in Belgium, but with French ancestors?
We adore fries, no matter what they’re named.
While historians dispute when and where our beloved fries originated, calling them french fries is uniquely American. In France and Belgium, they are simply “pommes frites” or fried potatoes. Chunks of fried potatoes in Spain are patatas fritas, and the Brits know them simply as chips. So why do fries have the word “french” in front of them in the States?
The phrase might relate to the dish’s preparation procedure. “Frenching” is a method of cutting items for uniform cooking, similar to julienne, with the goal of exposing both sides of an item, such as potatoes, to the heat of an oven or fryer. Other fried items that can be classified as “french fried,” such as onions or artichoke hearts, can be described as “french fried.” Others claim that when American soldiers returned from the WWI battlefields of Belgium with a taste for pommes frites, they dubbed them “French fries” since French was spoken there. Whatever the genesis story, the next time you bite into a crispy french fry, remember to thank the proud Belgians as well.