FOODIE
The Magic And Mystery Of Pommes Frites
The incalculable charm of a fried stick of potato garnished with salt and served piping hot
I think about French fries a lot.
Pommes frites, as they are called in France, even though they were invented in Belgium, are one of those popular foods that seem simple enough but are so easy to fuck up that they’re rarely done properly at all. It’s a lot like pizza that way. Pizza is nothing more than flour, water, yeast, salt, tomato sauce, and cheese. But bad pizza is the rule rather than the exception in most of the world.
There’s barely a restaurant in America that doesn’t serve fries in some form or another, and yet most of them are anywhere from forgettable to inedible. Why does it have to be this way? I’m betting that there was a time when fries in America were made with a higher standard in mind. But it was a small window.
You have to believe that the unparalleled success of the McDonald’s chain had a lot to do with the proliferation of French fries in America, and what we came to think of as quality. In the early days, they were hand cut, fried in beef tallow, and tasted like heaven on toast points. But then the health food people got after them, and they switched to tasteless canola oil in the 90s.
