French Fries Day will be celebrated tomorrow. Among the various theories, it’s generally accepted that the fries were invented by either the Belgians or the French. Find out more interesting stories related to the finger chips
Though no one knows about the exact origin of French fries, it is said that it can be in the year 1537, when the Spanish set sail for present-day Columbia, where they mistook potatoes for truffles. The potato was brought back to Spain and also introduced to Italy, where it was cultivated over time to agree with the local palette. The word potato comes from the Haitian word batata, which refers to a variety of sweet potatoes. The word came into Spanish as patata. When the later variants (called papas by the natives) were found, they were also called patata, and the word made its way into English as potato. Spud, the slang term for potatoes, derives from the spade-like tool used to dig potatoes out of the ground.
Among the various theories, it’s generally accepted that the French fry was invented by either the Belgians or the French.
In Belgium’s Meuse Valley between Dinant and liège, it was very common for the people to fry up small fish for their meals. When the rivers froze up, they would cut up potatoes in long thin slices, and fry them up as they did the fish.
During the French Revolution the royal gardens at Tuileries were turned into potato fields. By the 1800s, the Irish had come to depend on the potato almost entirely. A fungus spread totally wiped out the crop in the 1840s. Also in the 1840s, pomme frites (“fried potatoes”) first appeared in Paris. Sadly, we don’t know the name of the ingenious chef who first sliced the potato into long slender pieces and fried them. But they were immediately popular, and were sold on the streets of Paris by push-cart vendors. Frites spread to America where they were called French fried potatoes. Popular conjecture concludes that they came from France and they were fried potatoes, so they were called “French fried potatoes.”
The name was shortened to “French fries” in the 1930s. The verb “to french” in cooking has come to mean to cut in long, slender strips, and some people insist that “French fries” come from that term. However, the French fried potato was known since the middle 1800s, while the OED cites the first use of the verb “to french” around 1895, so it appears pretty convincing that “French fried potatoes” came before the verb “Frenching.” The origin of the name is thus the country of origin French and not the cooking term french. In the UK, fried fish had been on sale by street vendors since the 1600s. In 1864, a brilliant (but, alas, unknown) Brit teamed French fried potatoes (called “chips” in English) with fried fish, to create the famous and popular fish and chips.
Another story states that France only used potatoes as feed for animals, believing they carried disease. It wasn’t until the famine of 1785 that potatoes became popular in France. Once they did, the French began mass-producing potatoes and learned how to make fries, which they sold as “frites.” The French were the first to introduce the fry to America and Britain, and therefore, Americans dubbed it the “French fry.”
While the Belgians may or may not have invented the french fry, today, they do consume the most french fries per capita of any country in Europe.
Steak fries or chips, actually tend to have lower fat content than normal french fries, due to the lower surface to volume ratio.
French fry dipping choices vary from country to country: Americans prefer ketchup, while the British go for malt vinegar and in other parts of Europe, mayonnaise is the top pick.
French fries account for more than 1/4th of all potatoes sold in the US.