The French kiss isn’t French; it’s Ital­ian. French dress­ing isn’t French; it’s Amer­i­can. And French fries, as we know them, aren’t French; they’re Belgian.

And, in the same way that the too-Ger­man-sound­ing sauer­kraut became “lib­er­ty cab­bage” dur­ing World War I, even the “French” in French fries is flex­i­ble. In 2003, when France with­held its sup­port for the pro­posed U.S. inva­sion into Iraq, for awhile they became “free­dom fries.”

It’s like­ly that World War II U.S. Army grunts nick­named the twice-fried, long-cut (juli­enned) pota­toes that they encoun­tered in south­ern Bel­gium “French fries” sim­ply because south­ern Bel­gians speak French.

It’s exact­ly how, for cof­fee-mak­ing, we call the plunger pot a “French press.” We first saw it in or from France. The French don’t call it that. They call it a “cafetière à piston.”

For cen­turies, cooks have writ­ten recipes on both sides of the Atlantic for pota­toes “served in the French man­ner” or even “French-fried pota­toes,” but none were recipes for what we know as French fries. The pota­toes always were sliced very thin­ly (into “coins”) and cooked, in only one go, in some sort of fat, “goose-drip­ping,” to cite the 1828 “The Cook and Housewife’s Man­u­al” from England.

“They were very high rel­ish.” Indeed.

A recipe for such — “pommes de terre frites, à crû, en petites tranch­es” (“pota­toes fried, ini­tial­ly raw, in small slices”) — exists from 1802 in Thomas Jefferson’s hand­writ­ing, like­ly got­ten from his time as ambas­sador to France in the late 1700s.

Anoth­er inter­est­ing exam­ple comes from an 1838 issue of the Irish “A Freeman’s Jour­nal” for the “FRENCH METHOD OF COOKING POTATOES They divide into the thinnest pos­si­ble slices the pota­toe [sic], raw, not boiled, and fry it in the finest olive oil or butter.

“It then eats crimp (crisp or brit­tle) like the finest bis­cuit (cook­ie).” Note the old use of the verb “to eat,” as “to have a cer­tain con­sis­ten­cy on eat­ing.” What we have here are ear­ly instruc­tions for pota­to chips, or “crisps,” as the British and Irish call them.

But it was 20th-cen­tu­ry Bel­gians who per­fect­ed the French fry as we know it. (Full dis­clo­sure: I am half Bel­gian.) They are very par­tic­u­lar about method, rest­ing it on four cornerstones.

• First, use the cor­rect type of pota­to. For them, it is the Bin­t­je or Nico­la, vari­eties we rarely see. The Yukon Gold and sim­i­lar gold­en wax­ies are fine substitutes.
• Sec­ond, the pota­toes are washed, peeled and dried, and then cut (specif­i­cal­ly, juli­enned or, to use anoth­er culi­nary term that may fur­ther explain the name, “frenched,” as in “French-cut beans”) into thick sticks, not thin slices. In order to pre­serve any coat­ing of starch, at no point after the ini­tial peel­ing are the pota­toes rinsed.
• Third, the Bel­gians com­mon­ly fry in beef tal­low (melt­ed beef fat), some­thing by and large anath­e­ma to Amer­i­cans. We get by with good-qual­i­ty veg­etable oil. (That said, after an ini­tial taste, you will crawl on your knees through bro­ken glass to your next serv­ing of duck fat fries.)
• And fourth, and per­haps most impor­tant, cer­tain­ly most unique, Bel­gian-style French fries are cooked in two sep­a­rate phas­es or deep fat fry­ings, the first at a slight­ly low­er tem­per­a­ture than the sec­ond. The ini­tial fry­ing seals the exte­ri­or of each fry; the sec­ond crisps and browns it, as well as slight­ly steams the inte­ri­or mois­ture for a sort of “baked-pota­to-ish” center.

Vaca­tion­ers to Bel­gium often remark how the Bel­gians mop up may­on­naise with their fries. Sure, they also use ketchup, or var­i­ous oth­er sauces, but to them it’s their may­on­naise that matters.

Try the com­bi­na­tion your­self. It’s so fine.

Belgian “French” Fries

Adapt­ed (espe­cial­ly for Colorado’s ele­va­tion) and trans­lat­ed from recipes on the web­sites frietmuseum.be and gastronomie-wallone.be; serves 4–6.

Ingre­di­ents

• 3–4 cups veg­etable oil or, if you can find it, white beef tallow
• 2 pounds Yukon Gold or sim­i­lar pota­toes, cleaned, dried and peeled
• Salt to taste

Direc­tions

Cut or juli­enne the pota­toes into sticks 1/2‑inch wide and up to 3 inch­es long. Dry all the pieces thor­ough­ly with paper tow­el­ing. (Gen­tly “roll” them under your hand, using a cou­ple of lay­ers of paper tow­el­ing. At no point rinse them.) Sep­a­rate or pile them into batch­es about 1 cup each in volume.

Use a pot of a size that the melt­ed fat or oil reach­es halfway up the sides but no more than 3/4 of the way up. Heat the fat or oil to 300 degrees.

Deep-fry the pota­toes for 6 min­utes per batch. (They should be light­ly col­ored but not browned.) With a slot­ted spoon or “spi­der,” remove them to a flat­tened brown paper bag or 2 thick­ness­es of paper tow­el­ing, either cov­er­ing a bak­ing sheet. Before doing the next batch be sure to bring back the tem­per­a­ture of the oil in the pot to 300 degrees.

When fin­ished with the batch­es, let the pota­toes rest at room tem­per­a­ture for at least 30 min­utes or up to a few hours.

Reheat the oil to a tem­per­a­ture of 375 degrees. (Note the 75-degree dif­fer­ence from the first fry­ing.) Fry the pota­toes, as before in 1‑cup batch­es, until they are just browned and crisp, 1–2 min­utes. Drain on fresh brown paper bags or paper tow­els and place in a warmed serv­ing bowl lined with more paper tow­els. Sprin­kle with salt to taste and serve with mayonnaise.