May

9

A Chip Off The Old Block.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

May 9, 2008 |

In the summer between my junior and senior years in high school I got to be part of a special student trip to Europe and spent a week with a family in France. The first night we sat down to dinner and they served sliced fried potatoes. As part of our cultural exchange I asked them what they called the potatoes, and they told me “pomme frites”. They asked what we Americans called them, and I said, “French fries.” They were delighted. This was, by the way, almost two decades before the international embarassment of “Freedom fries”.

Now there’s another chapter in the history of the fried potato: As Patrick Barkham explains in a story for The Guardian, Eddy Van Belle has created the first museum devoted to the fried potato, in Bruges, Belgium. The Frietmuseum follows the history of the Peruvian tuber all the way to what the museum’s founder Eddy Van Belle claims is the freit’s origin in Belgium in the Eighteenth century. Wait a minute. Are we supposed to believe that nobody sliced and fried potatoes anywhere before Belgian fishermen did in the 1700s? Sure, if you say so, Mr. Van Belle. And no one put anything between slices of bread before the Earl of Sandwich.

Whenever I hear about a museum devoted entirely to something so specific, I wonder what the purpose really is. Museums serve the same three functions as libraries: acquisition, preservation, and access. They already have an official web site, but do fried potatoes–what some other English-speaking countries call “chips”, and which are served with almost every possible condiment from ketchup to tartar sauce to cheese curds in Canada–deserve their own museum? When something is put on a pedestal it immediately changes it. Is it possible that the French fry, chip, or frite will become off-limits now that it’s a museum piece? I’m reminded of Alice Walker’s short story Everyday Use, in which a daughter returns home from college wanting the family quilts she’d previously rejected, with plans to hang them on the wall and horrified that such priceless family artifacts might be put to “everyday use”.

Okay, I know it’s not likely the sliced, fried potato will become an object of reverence just because it’s got its own museum, but I’ve also got a serious hankerin’ for fries now. Check out this great and easy recipe for fries by VeganYumYum.


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