Why Are French Fries Called French Fries? Blame the Fat

In 1902 an American cookbook told home cooks there were two ways to fry, and it gave one of them a name. French frying meant the food went into a kettle of hot fat deep enough to cover it. Dry frying meant a shallow pan.

Potatoes cooked the first way were French fried potatoes, and the phrase was already about fifty years old in print by the time that cookbook got round to explaining it. That one fact strands all three of the origin stories that usually get the credit.

Why are french fries called french fries?

Because “French frying” was the American kitchen term for cooking by immersion in a deep kettle of hot fat, as against dry frying in a pan. “French fried potatoes” names the technique, so the word describes how the potato was cooked rather than which country the dish came from. Etymonline quotes the 1902 Household Cook Book making the distinction outright:

“There are 2 ways of frying known to cooks as (1) wet frying, sometimes called French frying or frying in a kettle of hot fat; and (2) dry frying or cooking in a frying pan.”

Etymonline dates the full phrase to 1856 and the clipped “French fries” to 1903 in American English. Immersion frying was regarded at the time as the French way to cook, which is the claim the adjective was making. English pinned the same adjective on manners: by 1741, slipping away from company without a word was taking French leave, the exit Americans now call an Irish goodbye.

The print record runs on four dates

Year	What is in print
1856	”French fried potatoes” first appears in print in English, in Eliza Warren’s Cookery for Maids of All Work
1902	The Household Cook Book defines “French frying” as wet frying in a kettle of hot fat
1903	The clipped form “French fries” is first attested, in American English
1910	”French fried potatoes” runs through the official bills of fare of the US Army

Warren’s 1856 text, quoted in Wikipedia’s entry on the dish, reads like a method note and nothing more: “Cut new potatoes in thin slices, put them in boiling fat, and a little salt; fry both sides of a light golden brown colour; drain.” The instruction covers fat and slicing and nothing else, and the spelling of colour suggests a British kitchen rather than an American one.

The soldiers in Belgium story is off by seven years

The version repeated most often holds that American troops arriving in Belgium around 1917 heard French spoken in the Belgian Army, assumed the local fried potatoes were a French dish, and named them accordingly. Wikipedia records the story and notes in the same breath that the name “was used long before that in English.”

Long before is an understatement. The 1910 Manual for Army Cooks, issued as War Department Document No. 379 and digitised in full at the Internet Archive, lists “French fried potatoes” again and again through its month of bills of fare: with liver and bacon at breakfast, with a ham omelet, with fried fish at dinner.

Woodrow Wilson did not go before Congress to request a declaration of war until 2 April 1917, per the US State Department’s own history office, and the first American troops landed in Europe that June. The Army had the phrase printed in its official menus seven years before the war that is supposed to have coined it.

The same manual brackets the arrival of the term. The 1896 edition has no French fried anything: its potato entries are boiled, baked, steamed, fried cooked and fried raw. So the phrase entered US Army usage somewhere between those two printings, and it did not come off a troopship.

An origin story can survive on retelling rather than paperwork for a very long time, which is the same predicament as the plague explanation attached to saying bless you after a sneeze.

The julienne theory has no dictionary behind it

The runner-up explanation says “French” describes the cut, from a verb “to french” meaning to slice into strips. Etymonline’s entry for “French” carries no culinary verb sense at all; the only verb sense it records for lowercase “french” is an unrelated slang term dated to about 1917. Wiktionary does list “To prepare food by cutting it into strips,” and attaches no date to it.

An undated verb cannot account for a phrase that was already in print in 1856. This one is assembled backwards: the fries are cut into strips, a verb exists, so the verb gets appointed as the source. Confident language rules often rest on nothing much when you go looking, in the way the supposed ban on opening a sentence with a conjunction does.

Jefferson’s kitchen had the dish, not the name

A note in Thomas Jefferson’s own hand, written some time between 1801 and 1809, calls for potatoes deep-fried while raw in small slices, and an 1802 White House dinner served “potatoes served in the French manner.” Wikipedia’s entry credits that recipe to his French chef, Honore Julien, rather than to Jefferson.

Both records describe how the potatoes were cooked. Neither is evidence about the name, which turns up in English decades later and in a cookbook rather than a presidential kitchen.

Belgium’s claim rests on a manuscript nobody has produced

The Belgian case comes from the journalist Jo Gerard, who said a 1781 family manuscript described potatoes being deep-fried in the Meuse valley before 1680, as a stand-in for fish when the rivers froze. Wikipedia notes that Gerard never produced the manuscript, that “the historical value of this story is open to question,” and that the potato did not reach the region until around 1735, which places a pre-1680 fry out of reach.

Who first lowered a raw potato into deep fat is unsettled, and Belgium and France both claim the honour. Where the English words came from is a different question, and that one has a paper trail ending in a cookbook instruction. Dull answers tend to hold the better documentation, which is also the story behind the reason a USB plug refuses to go in the first time.

Nobody chose to honour a country. A cook needed one word for the deep kettle and another for the pan, French frying was the word for the kettle, and potatoes were the food it stuck to hardest. The war story turned up afterwards, fitted the gap beautifully, and has been passed along for a century by people who never opened the 1910 mess manual. Strictly FYI.