French fries

• 1. Introduction

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  French fries began, or so the record shows, with Thomas Jefferson serving guests "potatoes served in the French manner" at a White House dinner in 1802. Nobody at that table could have imagined how much argument this dish would cause. France, Belgium, Spain, and Chile each claim to have invented the fried potato batons now called french fries. Historians have never fully settled it. Cooks disagree, too, about how many times you should fry one before it counts as done right. Half the English-speaking world does not even call the dish a french fry. What happens inside a strip of potato when it meets hot oil, sometimes twice. Why does the name split along a line that is partly linguistic and partly political. And how does a fried potato end up being picked apart by nutritionists, lawyers, and environmental scientists alike.

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• 2. The Double Fry

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  Cut potatoes, whether peeled or left in their skins, are shaped into even batonnet or julienne strips before anything touches hot oil. Cooks wipe or soak the pieces in cold water to strip away surface starch, then dry them thoroughly. Chefs generally agree a two-bath approach beats frying just once. Potatoes pulled straight from the ground carry too much water and turn soggy, so cooks favor ones that have sat in storage for a while.

  The first bath, sometimes called blanching, holds the fries in fat around 160 degrees Celsius, about 320 Fahrenheit, long enough to cook them through. This stage can be done well ahead of serving. A second, shorter dip in much hotter fat, around 190 degrees Celsius or 375 Fahrenheit, crisps the outside. Cooks then drain the fries in a colander or on cloth before plating them. For strips cut two to three millimeters thick, the first bath runs about three minutes and the second lasts only seconds.

  Since the 1960s, most fries made in the United States start from frozen russet potatoes that have been blanched or air-dried at an industrial plant. Vegetable oil is the standard fat today, though cooks once swore beef suet made better fries, with vegetable shortening as a fallback. McDonald's fried its potatoes in a mix of 93 percent beef tallow and 7 percent cottonseed oil until 1990. That year it switched to vegetable oil blended with beef flavoring. Horse fat was the norm in northern France and Belgium until recently, and some chefs still recommend it.

  Frying only once forces an impossible choice between two temperatures. Hot enough to crisp the outside, and the center stays raw; cool enough to cook the center, and the crust never crisps. In the first pass, at roughly 150 degrees Celsius, surface moisture evaporates from the cut. Water inside gets pulled into the starch granules, which swell and produce the fry's fluffy interior. Heat and water break the chemical bonds linking amylopectin and amylose strands inside the starch. This lets a new gel matrix form, one that traps moisture through hydrogen bonds.

  That gelatinized starch drifts toward the surface of the fry, building what researchers describe as a thick layer of pre-gelatinized starch. This layer becomes the crisp shell once the second frying pass cooks it again, at around 180 degrees Celsius. Remaining surface water boils off during this stage while the migrated starch molecules finish cooking into a hardened crust. The fry's golden-brown color comes from a Maillard reaction. This is the same browning chemistry triggered when amino acids and glucose on the potato's surface react under heat.

  None of this chemistry explains why the finished dish carries such different names depending on where you order it.

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• 3. Fries or Chips

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  Menus across the United States and most of Canada default to a single term: french fries, or french fried potatoes, occasionally capitalized as French fries. Cross into Great Britain, Australia, South Africa, Ireland, or New Zealand, and the default word becomes chips, a term common across most Commonwealth countries. There, the words french fries or skinny fries refer specifically to the thin-cut version, setting it apart from the thicker, traditional chip.

  In the US or Canada, that same thick cut sometimes goes by steak fries, while chips there usually means the packaged potato chips called crisps in the UK, Ireland, and South Africa. Australians and New Zealanders call their thick fried potatoes hot chips, to keep them separate from the bagged snack.

  The phrase french fried potatoes first appeared in print in English in 1856, inside Eliza Warren's book Cookery for Maids of All Work. Her recipe read: "Cut new potatoes in thin slices, put them in boiling fat, and a little salt; fry both sides of a light golden brown colour; drain." Those were thin, shallow-fried slices, not the thick batons associated with the dish today. Nobody has pinned down exactly where or when cooks began making the deep-fried, finger-shaped fries now considered standard.

  By the early 20th century, cooks were applying the phrase french fried to any deep-fried food, including onion rings and chicken. Americans had already been using the term as early as 1880. An 1899 item in Good Housekeeping pointed to French kitchen habits directly, noting that "the perfection of French fries is due chiefly to the fact that plenty of fat is used."

  One popular legend traces the name to World War One, when American soldiers arriving in Belgium assumed the dish was French because French was the language spoken in the Belgian Army. The term, though, predates the war by decades and was already used in the US Army. Its popularity did not even pick up in the years right after 1917.

  The label stuck to a country that may not have started the dish at all, which is where the real argument begins.

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• 4. A Disputed Birthplace

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  The earliest written mention of a fried potato comes from Chile, in the city of Nacimiento, dated 1629. It survives in Happy Captivity, a 1673 memoir by Francisco Nunez de Pineda, a Chilean soldier held by Mapuche warriors starting that year. He wrote of eating papas fritas, fried potatoes, and described Mapuche women sending fried and stewed potatoes to their chiefs. The exact shape he ate is unclear, likely wide slices or cubes cooked in lamb or guanaco fat, the customary method at the time. The narrow baton shape familiar today traces back to Europe instead.

  Spain got the potato before any other part of Europe, arriving with ships from the New World colonies, and some credit that head start with inventing the fry as it is known today. Paul Ilegems, curator of the Frietmuseum in Bruges, credits Saint Teresa of Avila with cooking the first french fries. He points to the broader tradition of frying in Mediterranean cooking as supporting evidence.

  Belgian food historian Pierre Leclercq has argued the opposite after tracing the dish's history: "it is clear that fries are of French origin." The dish became an emblematic Parisian food by the 19th century. Frederic Krieger, a Bavarian musician, learned to fry potatoes at a roaster on Paris's rue Montmartre in 1842. Two years later he carried the recipe to Belgium, where he opened a business called Fritz. There he sold what he billed as "la pomme de terre frite à l'instar de Paris," Paris-style fried potatoes. The fry as eaten today took its modern form in Paris around 1855, distinct from the plainer domestic fried potato of the 1700s.

  Belgian defenders of the dish's local origin blame the French name on what they call "French gastronomic hegemony." They say a shared language and close geography let Belgian cuisine get folded into France's culinary reputation. One Belgian journalist, Gerard, pointed to a 1781 family manuscript describing potatoes deep-fried before 1680 in the Meuse valley. The fries there supposedly stood in for fried fish whenever local rivers froze over. He never produced the manuscript, and researchers now describe its historical value as open to question. The claim runs into a bigger problem regardless: potatoes did not reach that region until around 1735, decades after the story's supposed setting. Eighteenth-century economics make the story less plausible still, since peasants could not have spared the volume of fat frying would require. As one skeptical account put it, "at most they were sautéed in a pan."

  Whichever country actually started the dish, it went on to become a fixture on both sides of the Franco-Belgian border, each side keeping its own name for it.

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• 5. Frying Across Europe

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  In Belgium, fries go by frieten in Flemish and frites in Belgian French, sold from shops called frietkot or frituur in Flemish, friteries in French, and snackbar in Dutch. Vendors serve them with a wide range of Belgian sauces, either alone or alongside other snacks. The traditional serving vessel is a cornet de frites, a white cardboard cone known as a patatzak, frietzak, or fritzak in Dutch and Flemish, or a Frittentute in German, wrapped in paper with a spoonful of sauce, often mayonnaise, on top.

  French speakers formally call the dish pommes de terre frites, though pommes frites, meaning fried apples, patates frites, or simply frites are more common in everyday use. When cut very small and thin, they take the names aiguillettes, needle-ettes, or allumettes, matchsticks. One enduring story credits street vendors on Paris's Pont Neuf bridge with inventing the fry in 1789, right before the French Revolution began. An earlier French reference from 1775, though, already mentions "a few pieces of fried potato" and "fried potatoes." Antoine-Augustin Parmentier campaigned in France for potatoes as a food source around this era, but his writing never specifically mentions frying them.

  A manuscript in Thomas Jefferson's own hand, written sometime between 1801 and 1809, records a recipe titled "Pommes de terre frites à cru, en petites tranches," potatoes deep-fried while raw, in small slices. The recipe almost certainly came from his French chef, Honore Julien. French fries today still carry size-based names: the thick pommes Pont-Neuf, cut around 10 millimeters; the narrower pommes allumettes, about 7 millimeters; and pommes paille, potato straws just 4 millimeters thick. Steak frites, a steak served alongside thin fries, remains a staple French dish.

  French fries reached German-speaking Europe during the 19th century, where they became known by the borrowed French term pommes frites, or the Germanized Pommes and Fritten. Germans eat them with ketchup or mayonnaise as a restaurant side dish or a street snack bought at an Imbissstand. Currywurst, popular since the 1950s, pairs a bratwurst or bockwurst sausage doused in spiced ketchup sauce and curry powder with a side of fries.

  Dutch speakers call the dish pommes frites or frites in French, frieten in Flanders and the southern Netherlands, or patat in the country's north and center, and it has become a national snack there. One popular street food, Patatje Oorlog, translates as "war fries": fries dressed with mayonnaise and a peanut-based satay sauce, topped with diced raw onion and other optional extras.

  Britain's standard chip runs 10 to 15 millimeters thick, sometimes left unpeeled with the skin showing. It is not the same thing as the bagged potato chip, called crisps there. Chips anchor fish and chips and other British dishes, and can be fried once or fried at multiple temperatures. Cookbooks began printing recipes for deep-fried cut potatoes starting in 1813. By the late 1850s, at least one had adopted the phrase "French Fried Potatoes."

  Mrs "Granny" Duce sold the first commercially available chips in the UK in a West Riding town in 1854. A blue plaque in Oldham now marks the birthplace of the fish-and-chip shop, and with it the start of Britain's fast food industry. Scotland's first chips were sold in Dundee's Greenmarket in the 1870s, by a Belgian immigrant named Edward De Gernier. Ireland's first chip shop opened in the 1880s, run by an Italian immigrant named Giuseppe Cervi. A 2011 estimate found 80 percent of UK households bought frozen chips every year. Despite chips' popularity across the Commonwealth, American chains such as McDonald's and Burger King did the most to spread the thinner french fry style worldwide.

  That same American export machine would go on to remake the potato business back home, on a far larger industrial scale.

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• 6. Frying Beyond Europe

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  Florenceville-Bristol, New Brunswick, calls itself the French fry capital of the world and is headquarters to McCain Foods, the largest manufacturer of frozen french fries and other potato products anywhere. The town also runs a museum called Potato World. Canada supplies 22 percent of the french fries China imports.

  Quebec's poutine turns the fry into a main ingredient rather than a side, piling fried potatoes with cheese curds and brown gravy. Historians generally place its invention in rural Quebec sometime in the 1950s, though exactly where in the province remains disputed.

  The J.R. Simplot Company gets credit for successfully commercializing the frozen french fry in the United States during the 1940s. In 1967, Ray Kroc of McDonald's contracted Simplot to supply frozen fries, ending the chain's reliance on fresh-cut potatoes. By 2004, frozen fries consumed 29 percent of the entire US potato crop, split 90 percent to food service and 10 percent to retail. The United States now supplies most of China's french fries, accounting for 70 percent of what China imports.

  Pre-made fries, fried or sometimes baked, then frozen in a sealed bag, have been available for home cooking since the 1960s. Some fast-food chains dip their raw fries in a sugar solution or starch batter before frying, to change their appearance or texture. French fries rank among the most popular dishes in the country, served constantly as a side dish or a fast-food staple. The average American eats around 30 pounds of them every year.

  In Spain, fried potatoes are patatas fritas or papas fritas, alongside a chunkier relative called patatas bravas: potato chunks, partially boiled, then fried and seasoned with a spicy tomato sauce. Fries also turn up across Latin American cooking, forming the base of Peru's salchipapas or Chile's chorrillana.

  Cape Town's regional specialty flips the usual texture entirely. Slap-chips, pronounced slup-chips in English or slaptjips in Afrikaans, are soft and soggy, doused in white vinegar. Cooks fry them thicker and at a lower temperature for longer than a standard french fry. Slap-chips anchor the Cape Town Gatsby sandwich and typically accompany deep-fried fish, dressed in that same white vinegar.

  Okonomiyaki fries, one Japanese take on the dish, top the potatoes with unagi sauce, mayonnaise, katsuobushi flakes, a furikake nori seasoning, and stir-fried cabbage. French fries themselves are simply a standard fast-food side dish across Japan.

  Every one of these regional versions layers on its own toppings, a habit that has spun off an entire category of dressed-up, loaded fries.

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• 7. Loaded and Dressed

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  Carne asada fries pile the potatoes with grilled carne asada, guacamole, sour cream, and cheese. Cheese fries add only melted cheese, while chili cheese fries add chili on top of that. Chorrillana, a Chilean creation, tops fries with sliced meat, caramelized onion, and fried eggs. Dirty fries smother the potatoes in melted cheese plus bacon, pulled pork, chili, or gravy, and loaded fries keep it simpler with just cheese and bacon.

  Curly fries get their spiral shape from a specialized slicer that cuts a whole potato into one helical ribbon. Tornado fries take a similar spiral cut, thread it onto a skewer, and deep-fry the whole thing. Waffle fries, or pommes gaufrettes, come from quarter-turning the potato between each pass over a grater blade before a single fry. Potato wedges stay thick, elongated, and skin-on rather than peeled.

  The french fry sandwich takes several regional forms: the chip butty, the horseshoe sandwich, french tacos, and the mitraillette all wrap or top bread with fried potatoes. Greek fries add feta cheese with tomatoes, red onion, and tzatziki, while kimchi fries top the potatoes with caramelised baechu-kimchi and green onions. Salt and pepper chips, 3-in-1 chips, and the spice bag come from British Chinese and Irish Chinese fusion kitchens.

  Triple-cooked chips go through three separate stages: a slow simmer, a cooling period, then two rounds of deep frying, first at just 130 degrees Celsius, then at 180. Oven fries and microwave fries skip the deep fryer for a lower-oil finish in a conventional oven or a microwave. Garlic fries add garlic and parsley, and sweet potato fries swap in sweet potatoes for the usual russet.

  Malt, balsamic, or white vinegar, mushy peas, curry sauce or curry ketchup, gravy, piccalilli, and even pickled eggs all show up as fry accompaniments somewhere in the world. Australians favor a seasoning called chicken salt, sprinkled straight onto the chips.

  All that cheese, gravy, and fat turn a simple fried potato into something nutritionists have a great deal to say about.

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• 8. The Fry Under Scrutiny

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  A large serving of french fries at McDonald's in the United States weighs 154 grams and carries 350 milligrams of sodium. Its 510 calories break down into 66 grams of carbohydrate, 24 grams of fat, and 7 grams of protein. The carbohydrate comes mostly from the potato's starch, the fat from oil absorbed during frying, and the protein from the potato itself, with salt added almost entirely as a surface seasoning.

  Jonathan Bonnet, writing in Time magazine, argued that frying, salting, and stripping away the potato's skin makes the finished fry "nutritionally unrecognizable from a spud," since the skin holds much of the potato's fiber and nutrients. Kristin Kirkpatrick called it "an extremely starchy vegetable dipped in a fryer that then loads on the unhealthy fat, and what you have left is a food that has no nutritional redeeming value in it at all." David Katz described fries as the fatty side dish typically paired with a burger, both often served alongside sugary ketchup and fatty mayonnaise. Eric Morrissette, a spokesperson for Health Canada, took a softer line: people should limit how often they eat fries, but occasional servings are unlikely to pose a health risk.

  Frying in beef tallow or lard adds saturated fat to the finished product, and swapping in tropical oils like palm oil merely trades one saturated fat for another. For years, manufacturers used partially hydrogenated vegetable oils to cut cholesterol and saturated fat. Researchers eventually linked the trans fats in those oils to cardiovascular disease. Starting in 2008, many restaurant chains and frozen-fry makers phased trans-fat oils out of their products.

  French fries carry some of the highest acrylamide levels of any food, a chemical that has drawn health concern. The American Cancer Society says it remains unclear whether eating acrylamide raises cancer risk in people. One meta-analysis found no link between dietary acrylamide and most common cancers, though it could not rule out a modest connection to kidney, endometrial, or ovarian cancer. Baking oil-and-spice-coated potato wedges at a lower temperature than deep frying cuts acrylamide formation, offering a lower-fat alternative.

  In April 2023, researchers in China reported a possible link between eating fried food and mental health problems. People who frequently ate fried food, especially potatoes, showed a 7 percent higher risk of depression and a 12 percent higher risk of anxiety than those who rarely did. The pattern stood out most among younger men. The researchers cautioned that the results are preliminary and could not establish whether fried food causes the symptoms, or whether people already prone to anxiety and depression simply prefer fried food.

  In June 2004, the US Department of Agriculture, acting on the advice of a federal district judge in Beaumont, Texas, classified batter-coated french fries as a vegetable under the Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act. Trade considerations drove the decision, since french fries fall short of the standard for a processed food. The ruling, known as the French fry rule, survived a legal challenge in the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in Fleming Companies, Inc. v. USDA.

  A 2022 study assessed the environmental footprint of 57,000 food products sold across the United Kingdom and Ireland. Among all of them, french fries came out with a smaller environmental impact than most of the other foods measured.

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