A short history of French fries

The French kiss isn’t French; it’s Italian. French dressing isn’t French; it’s American. And French fries, as we know them, aren’t French; they’re Belgian.

World War II U.S. Army grunts nicknamed the twice-fried, long-cut (julienned) potatoes that they encountered in southern Belgium “French fries” simply because southern Belgians speak French.

It’s exactly how, for coffee-making, we call the plunger pot a “French press.” We first saw it in or from France. The French don’t call it that. They call it a “cafetière à piston.”

For centuries, cooks have written recipes on both sides of the Atlantic for potatoes “served in the French manner” or even “French-fried potatoes,” but none were recipes for what we know as French fries. The potatoes always were sliced very thinly (into “coins”) and cooked, in only one go, in some sort of fat—“goose-dripping,” to cite the 1828 “The Cook and Housewife’s Manual” from England.

“They were very high relish,” says the manual. Indeed.

A recipe for such—“pommes de terre frites, à crû, en petites tranches” (“raw potatoes fried in small slices”)—exists from 1802 in Thomas Jefferson’s handwriting, likely gotten from his time as ambassador to France in the late 1700s.

Another interesting example comes from an 1838 issue of the Irish “A Freeman’s Journal” for the “FRENCH METHOD OF COOKING POTATOES They divide into the thinnest possible slices the potatoe [sic], raw, not boiled, and fry it in the finest olive oil or butter.

“It then eats crimp [crisp or brittle] like the finest biscuit [cookie].” Note the old use of the verb “to eat,” as “to have a certain consistency on eating.” What we have here are early instructions for potato chips, or “crisps,” as the British and Irish now call them.

But it was 20th-century Belgians who perfected the French fry as we know it. (Full disclosure: I am half Belgian.) They are very particular about method, resting it on four cornerstones.

First, to use a correct type of potato. For them, it is the Bintje or Nicola, varieties we rarely see. The Yukon Gold and similar golden waxies are fine substitutes. Second, the potatoes are washed, peeled and dried and then cut (specifically, julienned or, to use another culinary term that may further explain the name, “frenched,” as in “French-cut beans”) into thick sticks, not thin slices. To preserve any coating of starch, at no point after the initial peeling are the potatoes rinsed.

Third, the Belgians commonly fry in beef tallow (melted beef fat), something by and large anathema to Americans. We get by with good-quality vegetable oil. (That said, after an initial taste, you will crawl on your knees through broken glass to your next serving of duck fat fries.)

And fourth, and perhaps most important, certainly most unique, Belgian-style French fries are cooked in two separate phases or deep fat fryings, the first at a slightly lower temperature than the second. The initial frying seals the exterior of each fry; the second crisps and browns it, as well as slightly steams the interior moisture for a sort of “baked-potato-ish” center.

Vacationers to Belgium often remark how the Belgians mop up mayonnaise with their fries. Sure, they also use ketchup, or various other sauces, but to them, it’s their mayonnaise that matters.

Try the combination yourself. It’s so fine.