The invention of French fries is disputed, with both Belgium and France laying claim to their origin.
- Belgian Claim: It is believed that Belgians began frying strips of potatoes between the late 17th and early 18th centuries. According to legend, villagers in the Meuse valley, who normally fried fish, started frying potatoes when the river froze and fish was unavailable, creating an early form of French fries. Belgian researcher Pierre Leclercq also found that a German-born, Paris-trained cook named Herr Krieger introduced "Paris-style fried potatoes" to Belgium in the early 1800s and started cutting potatoes into sticks to fry them faster around 1845
- French Claim: France claims French fries as an emblematic Parisian dish from the 19th century. The French chef Honoré Julien is sometimes credited with popularizing the recipe in the 1850s. French fries were known in France as "pommes de terre frites," and Thomas Jefferson is credited with introducing the dish to America after encountering it in France in the late 18th century
The term "French fries" in the U.S. likely comes from either the style of cutting potatoes ("frenching") or from American soldiers encountering the fried potatoes in French-speaking Belgium during World War I
. In summary, while the exact inventor is unclear, the dish likely evolved from Belgian and French culinary traditions, with Belgium often credited for the earliest frying of potato strips and France for popularizing the recipe in the 19th century
