Nobody in France calls French fries or French toast âFrenchâ. Weâre definitely happy to attribute the fries to our Belgian friends and nobody thinks something as ubiquitous as toasts could have a single inventor. I think those are Anglo-Saxon cultural elements.
No we are not attributing fries to the Belgian, fries are french. The Belgian improved on our invention and make the best fries, but Frenchs invented it.
Content warning, a lot of french: https://www.musee-gourmandise.be/fr/musee-gourmandise/articles-de-fond?view=article&id=132:la-veritable-histoire-de-la-frite&catid=77:articles-fond
The article states hypothesis and guesses, it doesnât seem to provide a definitive answer.
Its conclusion, machine translated:
In the first two chapters, we talked about the unlikely birth of the deep-fried potato, the result of a marriage between the potato, a popular vegetable par excellence, and cooking in a fat bath, reserved for high society. Where could this marriage have taken place? In a well-to-do kitchen with a fine frying pan? Impossible, as we saw earlier. Potatoes have no place there. In the home of the poor potato-eating bastard? Impossible too. They donât have enough fat.
Isnât the answer to this question to be found in the streets of Paris, where in the 18th century, itinerant merchants carried their frying pans filled with dubious grease, into which they plunged meats and vegetables smeared with doughnut batter? Or is it to be found in a rotisserie with more extensive equipment? Itâs a tempting hypothesis. As we know, the fried potato has spread through commerce. Wasnât it born there? Is it not a purely commercial product? The inventor of the French fried potato will probably always remain anonymous, but we can guess his trade: a merchant. We can also guess his origin: Parisian.
Pierre Leclercq
March 2009 - December 2010
Anglo-Saxon cultural elements
You did your best to stamp those out back in 1066
Who the hell calls it a French press, Iâve never heard anyone call it that.
I never knew there was a different name for it. The cafetière is a new one on me, and I did French in high school. Guess we werenât talking about coffee much, though apparently french fries came up enough for me to remember pommes frites (they probably donât fry apples much over there).
The US calls everything âFrenchâ because they think itâll sell better.
