A QuixoticGuide food travel essay
There are foods you eat, and foods you travel for. French fries—frites, if you know where you are—belong firmly to the second category.
I’ve eaten them on plastic forks beside canals, from paper cones stained translucent with beef fat, and late at night when the city has stopped pretending it’s sober. Fries are not fast food; they are place food. Geography, language, and ritual cling to every golden stick.
The argument over their origin—Belgium or France—misses the point slightly. Fries feel invented by necessity, not nationalism. Along the Meuse River in the late seventeenth century, people fried small fish as daily sustenance. When winter froze the river, potatoes were cut into the same shapes and lowered into hot fat. The result was accidental genius: humble, filling, and quietly perfect. Survival food, turned cultural artifact.
France, of course, gave fries elegance. In Paris, pommes frites emerged not from hardship but from street life—sold along the Pont Neuf, eaten standing, fingers slick with oil. Potatoes had only recently been rehabilitated by Parmentier, transformed from suspicious tuber into national staple. The French didn’t invent fries, but they understood their potential.
And then there is Belgium, where fries stopped being a side dish and became an identity. The frietkot is not a snack bar; it is a civic institution. Fries are fried twice—first gently, then violently—always in beef fat. The outside shatters, the inside sighs. Sauce is not an afterthought but a philosophical choice: andalouse, samurai, stoofvleessaus, or simply mayonnaise, applied without irony.
The name “French fries” arrived later, courtesy of American soldiers during World War I, confused by language rather than borders. It stuck, like many travel misnomers do. The fries themselves didn’t care. They had already crossed frontiers, oceans, and social classes.
What fascinates me most is how fries adapt without losing their soul. In Britain they thicken into chips and soak up vinegar. In the United States they become engineered—uniform, optimized, omnipresent. Elsewhere, they arrive as street food, bar food, comfort food, drunk food. Always recognisable. Always local.
Fries are proof that the world’s most universal foods are often born from constraint. Cold winters. Empty rivers. Cheap ingredients. What starts as improvisation becomes tradition, and tradition becomes something people will argue about endlessly, lovingly, and with complete conviction.
So no, fries are not French. They are Belgian, French-speaking, American-named, and globally claimed. Like the best travel stories, they belong to everyone who has stood somewhere unfamiliar, holding a warm paper cone, realising that sometimes the shortest journeys lead to the deepest attachments.
— QuixoticGuide
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