DID YOU KNOW ?
We cannot talk about a deep fryer without speaking about French fries.
We cannot talk about French fries and not talk about… Belgium!
A few years ago, at a conference in Brussels organized by the Brussels Tourist Office, Belgian and French gastronomic historians met to try to appropriate to themselves the invention of the French fries.
I was invited as a Swiss gastronomic historian in order to, in a way, be the referee of this historical gastronomic contest about the origin of the French fries; a question that seemed quite trivial and humorous to me; at least… This is what I had imagined before I arrived there…
It was clear that I had totally underestimated the symbolic value of the origin of the fries, especially for our Belgian friends represented by a horde of fritkots (= owner of a chip shop) unleashed and passionate about such a question!
In these moments we really realize how much “History” means to each of us in a world where everything goes very fast, too fast sometimes!
The old cookbooks gave us the answer to this terrible question: Are the fries Belgian or French?
The first written records relating to the cooking of potato pieces in fat spoke of… Paris and the Pont-Neuf bridge. Can we therefore deduct that the origin of the French fries would be Parisian?
At this point in the explanation, I am at the limit of the culinary blasphemy, even insulting these wonderful Belgians who have no equal in self-mockery; what beautiful people!
I therefore made the wise decision to say that: “If the origin seems to be French, the real father is not the “birth father” but rather the one who nourishes and raises the product.
What a nice pirouette I did, which probably saved me from the collective lynching!
To finish this presentation, I wanted to tell you that I discovered on that occasion this wonderful world of belgian fritkots and I tasted exceptional French fries there; pre-cooked in horse fat and colored in beef beef fat. You absolutely have to discover this once in your life!