Each year, National Julienne Fries Day is observed on August 12th.
Cut into thin, uniform matchsticks, julienne fries tend to be crispier and are often called “shoestring fries”. The oldest written known reference to the julienne cut is the 1722 edition of Francois Massialot’s Le Cuisinier Royal et Bourgeois.
- Leaving the potato skin on French fries actually leaves in important vitamins that are lost if the skins are peeled away.
- French fries are, perhaps, poorly-named, since they originate in Belgium and are most popular in America.
- Though French fries were invented in Europe, the potatoes, from which they are made, originated in the Americas and were imported.
- The first occurrence of French fries in America may have been at a diplomatic dinner hosted by Thomas Jefferson
- French fries (American English, with “French” often capitalized), or chips, fries, or French-fried potatoes are batons of deep-fried potato.
- North Americans refer to any elongated pieces of fried potatoes as fries, while in the United Kingdom, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand, long, thinly cut slices of fried potatoes are often called fries to distinguish them from the more thickly cut strips called chips.
- French fries are known as frites, patates frites or pommes frites in French, a name which is also used in many non-French-speaking areas, and have names that mean “fried potatoes” or “French potatoes” in others.
- Between the 1850s and 1930s, French fries were known more illustratively as “French fried potatoes” in America. Around the 1930s, everybody dropped the “potatoes” on the end and just called them French fries.
- Steak fries, or chips, actually tend to have lower fat content than normal French fries, due to the lower surface to volume ratio.
- The slang term for potato, “spud”, comes from the spade-like tool that is used to harvest the potatoes.
- Americans eat more than 16 pounds of French fries every year, which comes to over 2 million tons!
- McDonald’s uses about 7% of the potatoes grown in the United States for its French fries. They sell more than 1/3 of all the French fries sold in restaurants in the U.S. each year.
- To burn off the calories in a medium order of McDonald’s French fries, you would need to do: 58 minutes of cycling, 90 minutes of bowling or 47 minutes of high impact aerobics.
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