French Fry Facts

The origin of French fries is Belgium. According to some historians, potatoes were being fried by 1680 in the Meuse Valley of Belgium. Locals often ate small fried fish, when the river was frozen they used potatoes as a substitute. They used to cut potatoes lengthwise and fry them in oil to use them as a fish substitute.

Thomas Jefferson gets the credit for introducing French fries to America when he served them at a White House dinner in 1802 after reportedly requesting, "Potatoes, fried in the French manner.

The average American eats thirty pounds of French fries per year.

The earliest known reference to fries in English literature is in A Tale of Two Cities. Charles Dickens refers to, “Husky chips of potato, fried with some reluctant drops of oil”.

In general, potatoes cooked with the skin on are healthier, as most of the nutrients in a potato come from the skin

French fries are eaten all over the world and every culture has its own preferred condiment. Americans dunk them in ketchup, Brits eat their chips with salt and malt vinegar, mayonnaise is a popular accompaniment in Belgium and they look forward to steamed mussels and fries, in Vietnam they serve fries with soft butter and a sprinkling of sugar. "Clams and chips" is a very popular dish in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. French fries served with hot mustard is very popular in Ireland

There is a museum in Belgium entirely devoted to the classic fast-food snack frites.

French Fries in France are known as frites, patates frites, or pommes frites in French. These names are also used in many non-French areas.

About seven per cent of the potatoes grown in the US are sold by McDonald’s. It sells more than one third of all the French fries sold in restaurants in the U.S. each year.

According to the Agricultural Research Service in Navarre, potato skins are packed with 60 phyto-chemicals, many of these are flavonoids which help lower bad cholesterol and keep arteries clear.

Belgians may or may not have invented the French fry, today, they do consume the most French fries per capita of any country in Europe.

Belgians, who are the world’s connoisseurs when it comes to French fries, occasionally will serve French fries with egg as a topping. The raw egg is cracked over the French fries immediately after the fries have been pulled from the fryer. This tends to mostly cook the egg, but leaves the yoke somewhat runny for dipping the fries in.

18 Common Words

What do all these words have in common? "Boredom", "flummox", "rampage", "butter-fingers", "tousled", "sawbones", "confusingly", "casualty ward", "allotment garden", "kibosh", "footlights", "dustbin", "fingerless", "fairy story", "messiness", "natural-looking", "squashed", "spectacularly". They were all invented / first used in print by Charles Dickens.

Charles Dickens

He was the author of numerous classics including Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, and A Christmas Carol. He attended elementary school until his life took a twist of its own when his father was imprisoned for debt. At age 12, he left school and began working ten-hour days in a boot-blacking factory. Dickens later worked as a law clerk and a court stenographer. 

At age 22, he became a journalist, reporting parliamentary debate and covering election campaigns for a newspaper. His first collection of stories, Sketches by Boz (Boz was his nickname), was published in 1836 and led to his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, in March 1836.