French fries
Fried potatoes, commonly known as French fried potatoes, French fries or simply fries, but also chips, Vlaamse frieten, or pommes de terres frites are pieces of potato that have been cut into batons and deep-fried.
In areas where "chips" is the common term, "French fries" usually refers to the thinner variant found in US-influenced fast food restaurants, or to the even thinner "shoestring potatoes". In North America "chips" generally means potato chips (called "crisps" in the UK and Ireland), which are deep-fried very thin slices of potato that are usually served at room temperature.
History
The straightforward explanation of the term is that it means potatoes fried in the French sense of the verb: "to fry" can mean either sautéing or deep-fat frying, while its French origin, frire, unambiguously means deep-frying : frites being its past participle used with a plural feminine substantive, as in pommes de terre frites ("deep-fried potatoes"). Thomas Jefferson, famous for serving French dishes, wrote exactly the latter French expression.In the early 20th century, the term "French fried" was being used for foods such as onion rings or chicken, apart from potatoes. The verb "to french", though not attested until after "French fried potatoes" had appeared, can refer to "julienning" of vegetables as is acknowledged by some dictionaries while others only refer to trimming the meat off the shanks of chops.
The Belgians claim that "French" fries are in fact Belgian, but definitive evidence for the origin has not been presented. Belgian historian Jo Gerard recounts that potatoes were already fried in 1680 in the Spanish Netherlands, in the area of "the Meuse valley between Dinant and Liège, Belgium. The poor inhabitants of this region allegedly had the custom of accompanying their meals with small fried fish, but when the river was frozen and they were unable to fish, they cut potatoes lengthwise and fried them in oil to accompany their meals."
The Dutch concur with a Southern Netherlandish or Belgian origin when referring to Vlaamse frieten ('Flemish fries'). In 1857, the newspaper Courrier de Verviers devotes an article to Fritz (assumed pun with 'frites'), a Belgian entrepreneur selling French fries at fairs, calling them "le roi des pommes de terre frites". In 1862, a stall selling French fried potatoes (frietkot, see below) called "Max en Fritz" was established near Het Steen in Antwerp. A Belgian legend claims that the term "French" was introduced when British or American soldiers arrived in Belgium during World War I, and consequently tasted Belgian fries. They supposedly called them "French", as it was the official language of the Belgian Army at that time. But the term "French fried potatoes" had been in use long before the Great War. Whether or not Belgians invented them, "frites" "quickly became the national snack and a substantial part of both national dishes — making the Belgians their largest consumers,[citation needed] and to Europe, their "symbolic" creators.
Americans attribute the dish to France — although in France they are often thought of as Belgian — and offer as evidence a notation by U.S. President Thomas Jefferson. "Pommes de terre frites à cru, en petites tranches" ("Potatoes deep-fried while raw, in small cuttings") are noted in a manuscript in Thomas Jefferson's hand (circa 1801-1809) and the recipe almost certainly comes from his French chef, Honoré Julien. It is worth noting, though, that France had recently annexed what is now Belgium, and would retain control over it until the Congress of Vienna of 1815 brought it under Dutch reign. In addition, from 1813 on, recipes for what can be described as French fries, occur in popular American cookbooks. By the late 1850s, one of these mentions the term "French fried potatoes." Recipes for fried potatoes (not clearly specified how) in French cookbooks date back at least to Menon's Les soupers de la cour (1755). It is true that eating potatoes was promoted in France by Parmentier, but he did not mention fried potatoes in particular. And the name of the dish in languages other than English does not refer to France; in French, they are simply called "pommes de terres frites" or, more commonly, simply "pommes frites" or 'frites'.
Some claim that the dish was invented in Spain, the first European country in which the potato appeared via the New World colonies, and assumes the first appearance to have been as an accompaniment to fish dishes in Galicia,[citation needed] from which it spread to the rest of the country and further to the Spanish Netherlands, more than a century before Belgium was created there. Professor Paul Ilegems, curator of the Friet-museum in Antwerp, Belgium, believes that Saint Teresa of Ávila fried the first chips, referring also to the tradition of frying in Mediterranean cuisine.
The first chip fried in Britain was apparently on the site of Oldham's Tommyfield Market in 1860. In Scotland, chips were first sold in Dundee, "...in the 1870s, that glory of British gastronomy – the chip – was first sold by Belgian immigrant Edward De Gernier in the city’s Greenmarket."
So-called "freedom fries"
"Freedom fries" was a short-lived name used by some Neoconservatives in the United States for French fried potatoes. On 11 March 2003, following the example set by a restaurant in Beaufort, North Carolina, the cafeteria menus in the three United States House of Representatives office buildings changed the name of French fries to freedom fries in a symbolic culinary rebuke of France stemming from anger over that country's opposition to the United States government's invasion of Iraq (Iraq was wrongly blamed for 9/11). As of 2 August 2006, they were back on the menu as French fries in the United States House of Representatives. The term "American fries" was also used. This was example of Neoconservative use of Political correctness.
External links
- French fries back on House menu, BBC News, 2 August 2006
References
- ↑ Mayonnaise was invented in France in 1756. But it was the German immigrant Richard Hellmann who in 1905 sold the first ready-made mayonnaise at Richard Hellmann's New York deli. He started selling mayonnaise in large glass bottles because it was easier to sell. In 1913, after continued success, he built a factory to produce his mayonnaise in even greater quantities, and began selling it on September 1 under the name Hellmann's Blue Ribbon Mayonnaise. Henry J. Heinz was the German American who created ketchup in 1892.
