when were french fries invented

French fries do not have a single, exact “birthday,” but most historians place their invention between the late 1600s and late 1700s in Western Europe, with the modern French fry likely emerging in France in the late 18th century.

Quick Scoop

• A popular legend says villagers in the Meuse Valley (in what is now Belgium) began frying potato strips as a substitute for small fried fish around the winter of about 1680, when the river froze and fish were unavailable.

• Many food historians argue that fries as we know them are more clearly documented in France, where references to fried potatoes appear by 1775 and street vendors were selling them near Paris’s Pont Neuf bridge in the 1780s.

• Because of this, the invention of French fries is usually framed as a France–Belgium dispute:
  • Belgium points to the 17th–early 18th century Meuse Valley frying tradition.

* France points to written references and Parisian street fries from the late 18th century, which are the closest to the modern style.

Bottom line: when people ask “when were French fries invented,” the safest answer is that they developed sometime between the late 1600s and late 1700s in Europe, with the first clearly documented, modern-style fries appearing in France around the 1770s–1780s.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.