French fries Period BOrigin theory BVerified

French fries are potatoes cut into sticks and fried in hot oil, a street food that came out of France and Belgium. They are eaten all over the world today, but the form we know took shape between the end of the eighteenth century and the nineteenth.

The potato crossed to Europe from the New World, and for a long time after it arrived it was grown as an ornamental plant or as animal feed; it took many years before people ate it every day. In the Low Countries it made its way onto the table over the course of the eighteenth century, and it reached the villages of the Meuse valley around the 1730s. In France, after Parmentier's campaign for the potato in the 1770s and 1780s, the vegetable itself was no longer hard to come by when fried potatoes began to be sold in the streets of Paris in the 1780s. What had yet to appear was the cooking technique: cutting potatoes into sticks and plunging them into a deep bath of hot oil.

That technique took shape in the street. In the 1780s, vendors selling fried potatoes set up on the Pont Neuf, the bridge across the Seine in Paris. The phrase pommes de terre frites is older still. It turns up in the report on an attempted poisoning at the abbey of Percy in Burgundy in 1760, printed in 1775 in a collection of court cases, Causes célèbres, curieuses et intéressantes. What was cooked there, though, was thin slices lightly browned in a little fat, a different thing from today's fried sticks. The oldest recipe anyone has so far been able to point to is in the 1794/95 cookbook La cuisinière républicaine, and it too deals mostly with thin slices rather than the thick sticks familiar today. By the estimate of the food historian Pierre Leclercq, the Pont Neuf vendors began plunging slices into a deep bath of oil around 1800, and the stick shape, the bâtonnet, had appeared in Paris by 1840 at the latest, about ten years before sticks show up in cookbooks. Even in cookbooks, sticks did not fully take over until the twentieth century.

The dish reached Belgium in 1844, when Frédéric Krieger, a native of Bavaria, brought it in under the name pommes de terre frites à l'instar de Paris, fried potatoes Paris-style. A short news item in the Paris newspaper Le Constitutionnel of 21 May 1844 also reports that a trader had begun selling fried potatoes "in the Paris manner" in Brussels. Belgium was the country that took the dish in and made it a national specialty. Frying the potatoes once and then a second time first appears in writing in Le ménage populaire, a household cookbook published in Verviers in 1889; who started doing it, and when, is not known, but it was being done by that year at the latest. This fried potato put down roots not at grand tables but as street food, eaten standing up by people passing the stalls on the bridges and in the markets.

In Belgium there is a story that places the origin of French fries in the seventeenth century. It was put forward in 1984 by the journalist Jo Gérard, who based it on a manuscript written in 1781 by his ancestor Joseph Gérard: in the Meuse valley around Namur, the story goes, people were already frying potatoes by about 1680.

The manuscript itself says that the people of Namur, Andenne and Dinant, when the river froze over and fishing became risky, cut potatoes into the shape of little fish and fried them, and that the custom went back more than a hundred years. The date of 1680 came from counting that hundred-odd years back from 1781. Pierre Leclercq, a food historian at the University of Liège, reads the text differently. Since an eighteenth-century peasant could hardly have spent a large quantity of fat on potatoes, he takes this "frying" to mean potatoes browned in a little fat (rissolées), something other than sticks plunged into a deep bath of oil. He also places the start of the custom after 1739, the year the Meuse froze.

The dates fail even earlier. As Leclercq shows, drawing on the work of Pirotte, the potato reached the Namur region only around 1735. In about 1680 there were not yet any potatoes in that country to fry.

The same yardstick applies to an old record on the French side. The phrase pommes de terre frites already appears in the report on a case of 1760 at the abbey of Percy in Burgundy (printed in a collection of court cases in 1775), but what is cooked there is again slices browned in fat, not fried sticks. An old name is one thing; the existence of the fried potato we know today is another.

What the sources do point to is the French sequence of events. In the 1780s vendors of fried potatoes appeared on the Pont Neuf in Paris, and by 1794/95 a recipe had made it into a cookbook. By Leclercq's estimate, those vendors began plunging slices into a deep bath of oil around 1800, and the stick shape had appeared in Paris by 1840 at the latest. Leclercq traced this sequence by working through primary sources in archives and libraries. The irony is that the man who confirmed the French origin is himself a Belgian scholar. The plain facts of when the potato became food and when it was first fried in sticks tell the beginning of this dish far more accurately than the proud national legend.