Where are the french fries from?

I think french fries are from France. They have to be called french fries for a reason. I wonder if they call still it French fries in France. Maybe they call it American fries since Americans call they French Fries

The story goes that fries date back to 1680: the inhabitants of Namur, Andenne and Dinant in Belgium used to fish in the Meuse River and fry the little fish they caught to improve their diet. However, when rivers and streams froze over and it was dangerous to fish, people used to cut potatoes into the shape of little fish and fry them. As for the name "French fries", it is alleged to come from either the Irish "to french", meaning "to cut", or from the American allies who, when they landed in the Belgian Ardennes, tasted our incomparable fried potatoes and called them "French fries", French for the language spoken by the inhabitants and fries because of the way they were cooked. Whenever the case may be, fries are definitely Belgian! source:http://askville.amazon.com/origin-French-fries-originated-France/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=9287056 see also below matter which is from link http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2033/whats-the-origin-of-french-fries The generally accepted story is that a French army officer named Parmentier was taken prisoner during the Seven Years War (1756-1763), and ate potatoes as part of his prison diet in Hamburg, Germany. He found that he liked them. After his release, he managed to introduce them to the French court ("Your majesty, the potato. Potato, I have the honour to introduce King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette. Introductions all the way round.") Marie Antoinette reportedly once wore a potato flower as a corsage. But she decided to take a break from eating cake and so ate potatoes. What the queen did was what everyone did, so the potato became fashionable and entered French cuisine. From France, to the world. As an indication of the speed of this change in attitude, during the French Revolution, some 25 years later, the royal gardens at Tuileries were turned into potato fields. By the 1800s, the Irish had come to depend on the potato almost entirely. A fungus spread totally wiped out the crop in the 1840s, leading to the tragic and famous potato famine. And so we arrive at your question. For also in the 1840s, pomme frites ("fried potatoes") first appeared in Paris. Sadly, we don't know the name of the ingenious chef who first sliced the potato into long slender pieces and fried them. But they were immediately popular, and were sold on the streets of Paris by push-cart vendors. Frites spread to America where they were called French fried potatoes. You asked how they got their name--pretty obvious, I'd say: they came from France, and they were fried potatoes, so they were called "French fried potatoes." The name was shortened to "french fries" in the 1930s. By the way, the verb "to french" in cooking has come to mean to cut in long, slender strips, and some people insist that "french fries" come from that term. However, the French fried potato was known since the middle 1800s, while the OED cites the first use of the verb "to french" around 1895, so it appears pretty convincing that "french fried potatoes" came before the verb "frenching." The origin of the name is thus the country of origin French and not the cooking term french.

This should explain it just fine: Many Americans attribute the dish to France — although in France they are almost exclusively thought of as Belgian — and offer as evidence a notation by U.S. President Thomas Jefferson. "Pommes de terre frites à cru, en petites tranches" ("Potatoes deep-fried while raw, in small cuttings") in a manuscript in Thomas Jefferson's hand (circa 1801-1809) and the recipe almost certainly comes from his French chef, Honoré Julien.

belgian historian jo gerard recounts that potatoes were already fried in 1680 in the spanish netherlands.the poor inhabitants of this region allegedly had the custom of accompanying their meals with small fried fish but when the river was frozen and they were unable to fish,they cut potatoes lengthwise and fried them in oil to accompany their meal. "frenching" is actually the technique of cutting something into long strips rather than a description of where fries originate .in fact the process of deep frying potatoes in oil originated in spain but the modern french fry was developed in BELGIUM