• oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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    3 days ago

    Nobody in France calls French fries or French toast “French”. We’re definitely happy to attribute the fries to our Belgian friends and nobody thinks something as ubiquitous as toasts could have a single inventor. I think those are Anglo-Saxon cultural elements.

      • thedarkfly@feddit.nl
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        3 days ago

        As a Belgian, this is my position as well. Fries is part of the Belgian culinary culture, but it’s chauvinism to claim they were invented in Belgium.

      • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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        3 days ago

        The article states hypothesis and guesses, it doesn’t seem to provide a definitive answer.

        Its conclusion, machine translated:

        In the first two chapters, we talked about the unlikely birth of the deep-fried potato, the result of a marriage between the potato, a popular vegetable par excellence, and cooking in a fat bath, reserved for high society. Where could this marriage have taken place? In a well-to-do kitchen with a fine frying pan? Impossible, as we saw earlier. Potatoes have no place there. In the home of the poor potato-eating bastard? Impossible too. They don’t have enough fat.

        Isn’t the answer to this question to be found in the streets of Paris, where in the 18th century, itinerant merchants carried their frying pans filled with dubious grease, into which they plunged meats and vegetables smeared with doughnut batter? Or is it to be found in a rotisserie with more extensive equipment? It’s a tempting hypothesis. As we know, the fried potato has spread through commerce. Wasn’t it born there? Is it not a purely commercial product? The inventor of the French fried potato will probably always remain anonymous, but we can guess his trade: a merchant. We can also guess his origin: Parisian.

        Pierre Leclercq

        March 2009 - December 2010

      • Valmond@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        Like the espresso, invented by the French (express or exprés? nobody knows which one it was, but making 1 little cup at a time was new and fast), then the Italians improved it, especially with gruppo 61, group head 61. Now they have the best coffee 😔

          • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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            3 days ago

            Maybe it is interchangeable sometimes, but English people would rather point at the UK, while Anglo-Saxons often abusively refers to UK plus majorly white former British colonies, USA, Canada, Australia and New-Zealand.

            • FozzyOsbourne@lemm.ee
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              3 days ago

              Interesting. I’d probably call that “the anglosphere”, Anglo-Saxon is specifically the pre-Norman-conquest residents of what is now England.

              • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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                2 days ago

                Wouldn’t the Anglosphere include every English speaking countries like South Africa, India and others?

                • FozzyOsbourne@lemm.ee
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                  2 days ago

                  Maybe. There’s also “The Commonwealth” which includes them but which the USA explicitly opted out from (by gaining independence from the British Empire before it was cool).

    • Prunebutt@slrpnk.net
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      3 days ago

      FIY: French toast is the english name for pain perdu.

      Also probably not “invented” by the French, but no one thinks they invented simple toast.