FRENCH fries are a big part of the world’s fast food industry.
They are smaller and thinner than our normal chips. They are served soft or crispy but always hot. They are eaten as part of lunch or dinner or by themselves as a snack. They most commonly appear on the menus of fast food restaurants, pubs, and bars
They are loved because of their diversity and how they can be paired with just about any meal.
Today, they will be put on a spotlight as the world celebrates World French Fries Day – although conflicting views on the origin of French fries have arisen over the years.
Some food historians claim that what we enjoy today as French fries, may not be a French creation but a Belgian one. According to them, Belgium was where potatoes were first fried in the late 1600s. Belgian villagers had already sliced and fried their fish this way to eat as a snack.
Other historians claim that French fries are indeed from the French.
According to these historians, thin potato fritters were first sold by street vendors at Paris’s Pont Neuf in the 1780s.
They were one of the most popular snack items before the French Revolution.
This claim is supported by a manuscript written by early United States president Thomas Jefferson in the early 19th century, where he talks about “pommes de terre frites en petites tranches” – potatoes, deep-fried while raw, in small slices. Historians claim the recipe is from French chef Honoré Julien. By the 1850s, it was a featured recipe in American cookbooks and was known as French Fried Potatoes.
Jefferson apparently had “potatoes served in the French manner” at a White House dinner in 1802. Historians claim that the expression French fried potatoes first occurred in print in English in the 1856 book Cookery for Maids of All Work by E Warren.
French frying potatoes results in the thin, shallow fried slices of potato, as distinct from deep-fried fatter, pan-fried chips.
