French Fries: Historical Overview

Whether crispy strips or crackling, paper-thin chips, french fries came to the United States from France. American legend suggests that they were “invented” in Saratoga Springs, New York, in the early 1850s, but recipes for deep-frying exceedingly thin slices of raw potato had long been appearing in published French works, at least as early as 1795–1796 with the anonymous, revolutionary La Cuisinière Républicaine. In 1824Mary Randolph gave a recipe “To Fry Sliced Potatoes,” in which she directs that raw potatoes should be “cut in shavings” before frying them in lard “over a quick fire … till they are crisp,” so it would seem that even in the United States, paper-thin, deep-fried potatoes were known decades before they were introduced as “Saratoga chips.” Indeed, directions for deep-frying sliced raw potatoes appear in a document in Thomas Jefferson’s hand that clearly dates from the years 1801–1809, his years in the President’s House when he had a French chef and maître d’hôtel in attendance; there can be little question that Randolph got her recipe—one that was plagiarized throughout the century—from the Jefferson family. In both France and America, early published recipes call for very thin slices of raw potato to be deep-fried until crackling crisp, but some authorities believe that deep-fried strips of potatoes had been sold by vendors on the bridges of vieux Paris well before the appearance of the recipe of 1795–1796, citing pommes de terre Pont-Neuf, the crispy, thin strips found in any Paris bistro today; apparently they were regarded as plebeian, as indeed they still are.