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all the rules. In fact, French fries are not classically French. Belgians point out that true French fries are made by using two frying baths, the first at a lower temperature than the second, just as Alain Passard makes them, and that French cooks did not double-fry their fries until well into this century, long after the Belgians had discovered the principle. Only Americans attribute fries to the French. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the name back to 1894, when it appeared in “Tictocq,” a short story by the American writer O. Henry, which was published in his humorous weekly, the Rolling Stone, just before he fled the country on a charge of bank embezzlement in Austin, Texas. The OED should hire my assistant Tara Thomas, who has found another, perhaps earlier, 1894 instance in a recipe for “French fried potatoes” in Dr. N. T. Oliver’s cookbook, Treasured Secrets, in the New York Public Library.

Neither source treats the name as unusual or exotic, and so it must have been current in speech and perhaps even print, although nobody has found an earlier example. Some people believe that the “French” in “French-fried potatoes” comes from the culinary verb “to french,” meaning to cut into thin strips, as in “frenched beans.” (This does not explain why we use “frenching” to refer to short-sheeting a bed as a practical joke. The British call it an “apple-pie” bed, for no apparent reason.) The nickname “French fries” first appears in print in 1918, though Graham Greene uses the compromise phrase “French frieds” as late as 1958 in Our Man from Havana, which you should read as soon as possible—if you haven’t already. There is no record of when “fries” alone appeared.

Neither Dr. N. T. Oliver nor Fannie Farmer, in the first edition of The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, published two years later, uses the double-frying technique, which first appears in an American cookbook in 1906. To understand the virtues of double-frying, cut up a potato into French-fry-sized strips, dry them with paper towels, and fry them at a steady 360 degrees Fahrenheit until they become golden brown. Either the outsides will be tough and dark or the insides will taste and feel undercooked. The reason is that potatoes have a very high “thermal inertia.” It takes a long time for heat to penetrate and cook to the center of the potato. And by the time it does, the outside gets overdone. When potatoes are fried twice, the interior gets cooked in the relatively cool first frying of five or more minutes—but before the outside can color and seal. Then the surface is made brown and crisp by plunging the potatoes into very hot oil. The crust quickly becomes impermeable to oil and remains no more than a half millimeter thick.

Cooking the inside means both evaporating a good part of the water (potatoes are 70 percent to 80 percent water) and gelatinizing the starch—causing the hard, microscopic starch granules that line the potato cells to absorb water and swell into puffy, tender, fragile pillows filled with gooey, wet starch. Gelatinization starts when the pieces of potato are heated to about 150 degrees Fahrenheit and is complete when the very heart of each French fry reaches 170 to 180 degrees.

That’s it, in theory at least. Yet every French chef seems to have his or her own special method. The possibilities are endless. What variety of potatoes is best? Should they be peeled and, if so, with a knife or a vegetable peeler? Should they be cut irregularly by hand or into perfect strips with a machine? Should the strips be patted dry with a towel, or washed first, or soaked in ice water, or blanched in boiling water? How many fryings are ideal, in what fat or oil, and at what temperatures? If two fryings are good, would four be better? How much time should elapse between fryings? What kind of salt should you sprinkle on them?

The towering Joël Robuchon, long considered the greatest chef in the Western world, recommends a potato variety called Agria, likes slightly irregular hand-cut shapes, blanches his potato strips in unsalted boiling water for two minutes,