French fries may be French after all, whatever Belgium insists
Belgium and France still argue over who invented fries, and the oldest written fried potato is neither: a Spanish soldier held captive by Mapuche warriors in Chile ate them in 1629. The stick shape did come from Europe, and a Belgian historian now concludes that the modern fry was born in Paris.
Francisco Nunez de Pineda described eating papas fritas as a prisoner at Nacimiento, probably slices or cubes fried in lamb or guanaco fat. One Spanish theory credits Saint Teresa of Avila with the first European version. Belgian food historian Pierre Leclercq, however, says the evidence points clearly to France: fries were a signature Paris dish in the nineteenth century, and a Bavarian musician named Frederic Krieger learned them on the rue Montmartre in 1842 and opened a Belgian shop selling Paris-style potatoes in 1844. A popular Belgian claim that villagers in the Meuse valley deep-fried potatoes before 1680 rests on a manuscript nobody has produced, and potatoes did not even reach that region until about 1735.
The English name is older than the popular story that American soldiers in the First World War mistook Belgian chips for French ones. Eliza Warren printed a recipe for French fried potatoes in 1856, although hers were thin shallow-fried slices, and Americans used the term by 1880. Thomas Jefferson's papers include a note on raw potatoes fried in small slices, almost certainly from his French chef Honore Julien.
Good fries depend on starch chemistry. A first fry in fat around 160 degrees cooks the inside: water swells the starch granules into a gel, giving a fluffy centre, and some of that gelatinised starch migrates to the surface. A second, shorter bath near 190 degrees drives off the last surface moisture and turns that layer crisp, while the Maillard reaction between amino acids and glucose browns it. Stored potatoes beat fresh ones, whose extra water makes fries soggy.
Fat has changed too. McDonald's fried in a blend that was 93 per cent beef tallow until 1990, and horse fat was long standard in northern France and Belgium. Names shift by country: Britons say chips and call the thin kind French fries, while Belgians buy frites in a paper cone topped with mayonnaise.
Source: French fries
