Among these are such current all-American favorites as vanilla ice cream, macaroni and cheese (for which Jefferson sent to Naples for a “ maccaroni machine”), and fried potatoes, which Jefferson originally knew as pommes de terre frites à cru en petites tranches (potatoes deep-fried while raw, in small cuttings). Jefferson had his slave James Heming-brother of the famous Sally-trained as a chef during his stay in France, and about 150 recipes that he collected at the time have survived, some recorded in Jefferson’s own hand, others transcribed and passed down by his granddaughters.
Thomas Jefferson-possibly the first American foodie-is generally credited with introducing the French fry to America and in his case the fries were definitely French, Jefferson having encountered them while serving as American Minister to France from 1784 to 1789. In it, he describes the potato, one of the principal foods of the natives, as “a kind of earth nut which, after it is boiled, is as tender as cooked chestnuts.” Brought home to Spain, the Incan potatoes may very well have been served fried-frying in oil was a Spanish culinary tradition-though the end result wouldn’t have looked much like a French fry, since early potatoes were lumpy and no bigger than golf balls. The first written mention seems to have been that of Pedro Cieza de Leon, a teenage conquistador turned historian, who in 1553 published a memoir of his experiences titled The Chronicle of the Incas, or the Seventeen-Year Travel of Pedro Cieza de Leon Throughout the Mighty Kingdom of Peru. Or they may even be Spanish, since the Spaniards, after all, were the first Europeans to encounter the South American potato. Would a Fry by Any Other Name Taste as Delicious?Īlternatively, French fries really were French, first sold by street vendors on Paris’s Pont Neuf in the 1780s. It’s said that this dish was discovered by American soldiers in Belgium during World War I and, since the dominant language of southern Belgium is French, they dubbed the tasty potatoes “French” fries. In winter, when the river froze, the fish-deprived villagers fried potatoes instead. Some claim that fries originated in Belgium, where villagers along the River Meuse traditionally ate fried fish. The French fry-though indisputably a fry-may not actually be French. This was a high point in the history of the French fry. Bohnenberger sued and was awarded a compensatory sum of 2,000 euros for the missing fries, possibly the most money ever spent on two strips of potato. Titled “Pommes d’Or,” the crossed fries were displayed in a room of their own at the Munich-based art gallery Mosel and Tschechow, where, according to the artist, they were intended to demonstrate “the metamorphosis of a profane, everyday object into a sacred artwork.” Trouble arose in 2005, when it was discovered that the original plain-potato fries on which the gold cross was based-an integral part of the exhibit-had mysteriously vanished. Stefan Bohnenberger is famed for having made a cross of gold from a pair of French fries.
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