Fries etiquette 101: you've gotta share 'em

Redemption for me, a core recipe for you in this month's Friendship Food 🍟

Bonjour! Bonjour!

It’s Friendship Food week again and this time I’ve got a recipe for what I consider the friendliest of food to share among friends: Fries! Picture this — you’re around the table with people you love being with. There’s a plate of fries in the center. They’re golden brown and steaming hot. What’s the first thing that everyone does? Reaches in and grabs one, of course. There’s nothing formal about fries — no rules for passing the plate. I said to imagine yourself around the table with friends, but you know as well as I do, that if you were with people you barely knew and there were fries within reach, you’d have to sit on your hands to keep from digging in.

I’ve also got a recipe for homemade mayonnaise, because ketchup isn’t fries only pal. I learned to make this mayo from my friend, Priscilla Martel — it’s not just luxurious, it’s fun to make and quick: You get a little bowl of it in under 5 minutes. (Because this mayonnaise is made with a raw egg, depending on your tolerance for raw eggs and the availability of wholesome eggs at your market, you might want to tuck the recipe away for another time and grab your favorite storebought dipper.)

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And as I do every month in honor of xoxoDorie readers, I made a donation to an organization doing good work. This month, I supported Wildfire Birthday Cake Initiative, started by the super-talented pastry chef, Rose Wilde. With Los Angeles still reeling from the fires, Rose is making birthday cakes for children who were displaced because of them. I love this idea and love what Rose does (take a look at Rose’s Substack: Eat More). Thank you dear wonderful readers for making this possible.

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The wildest summer season

For one season, a glorious one, I was a baseball fan. It was 1986, the NY Mets were “amazin’” again and Joshua, who was in first grade, was crazy about them. He listened to the games on radio and watched them on tv whenever he could. And I watched with him. It was the year I came to appreciate the slow rhythm of the game, the clever banter of the commentators, the rituals and traditions and the joy of listening to the play-by-play in rural Connecticut on a portable radio with iffy reception and tinny sound. We went to a few home games but mostly we watched and listened, groaned, cheered and smiled when Bob Murphy, one of the announcers, would say, “And now for the happy recap.”

That year there were many happy recaps — it was the year the Mets went to the World Series. And won. We watched every game and while there were so many great moments, the one I still think about almost 40 years later was a line from the commentator Tim McCarver. The Boston Red Sox’s first baseman, Bill Buckner, missed picking up a slow ground ball and it ended up costing the Red Sox the series. As Buckner was fumbling to right the situation, McCarver said (I’m paraphrasing, but I’m close): “The ball rolled through his wickets [his legs] and onto the first line of his obituary.” McCarver was a genius at this kind of on-the-spot sum-up and sadly for Buckner, he was prescient. Search what Buckner was famous for, and you’ll find the 10^th-inning error in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series.

If I had to guess what the first line of my obituary would be — and nope, I don’t spend much time on this kind of parlor game, but it came to mind recently — I’d predict: She burned her parents’ kitchen down when she was 12.

I did. And when my first book was published in 1991 (Sweet Times), my brother was surprised that I didn’t mention it in the introduction. Who’d trust me had I led with that? Almost twenty years later, when Around My French Table came out, I told the story and now it’s usually the first thing an interviewer will ask me.

Burning it down: the short version

It was a Saturday night, my parents were out, the babysitter was upstairs with my brothers, and I had two friends with me downstairs. We had a craving for fries and I knew that there was a box of them in freezer. What I didn’t know was how to heat them. Neither did my friends. And none of us thought to read the instructions on the package. And so, I put a big pot of oil up to boil — channeling my inner Nathan’s fry-cook I’d seen in Coney Island — and I covered the pot, thinking that if water boiled faster when it was covered, so would oil. When I lifted the lid, the oil flamed almost instantly. The fire ringed the pot and the tips of it licked the overhead cupboards. The ones, like everything else in the kitchen, that had just been renovated. I don’t remember how we extinguished the fire — I was smart enough not to douse it with water — but I do know that when my parents returned, they found me, my brothers, the babysitter and the fireman on the front stoop. My friends had scrambled away.

After that, I didn’t cook again until I got married and had to.

Mistakes are a part of life, but it's how we learn from them that truly defines us. Don't let one error define your entire career. It's what you do next that truly matters.

Bill Buckner

Fries as a through line in my life

I certainly didn’t make French fries again — not frozen, not from-scratch, no way, ever. But I ate them all the time. As a young teenager growing up in Brooklyn, my friends and I would spend Friday and Saturday nights walking up and down Avenue J, our local shopping street. “All” the kids did — which is what I told my mother so that I could get permission to do it too. And all the kids ended up at Cooky’s, a large neighborhood restaurant that for reasons I’ll never understand, actually welcomed us even though we were noisy, we table-hopped and we didn’t order much. While my standing order in the afternoon was an ice cream soda (more another time — it was sooo good), at night, “all” the kids had cokes and fries. As with so much, I remember the experience more than the details. Were the fries skinny? I don’t think so. (Maybe Michael will remember — he was a Cooky’s kid before me.) Were they served in a paper cone? Probably not. Did I have them with ketchup? For sure. How did I not weigh a trillion pounds? I don’t know. Chalk it up to the miracle of youthful metabolism.

It's the pleasure of the fries that I remember. I remember the fries as communal food — we’d share them. We’d pick them up with our fingers. We’d dip them into ketchup. Did we double-dip? Probably. We talked non-stop. We’d order more fries.

I don’t eat fries as often as I did as a kid, but I love them just as much. Whenever we go to the Bistrot Paul Bert, if someone doesn’t order the signature steak-frites (steak with peppercorn sauce and a side of fat, crispy fries), I’ll order fries for the table. No one says no, everyone reaches in. And if someone orders the steak, we’ll all drag our fries through their plate of sauce — without asking permission.

And when, as I often do late in an afternoon, I bring some work to Les Éditeurs, the café down the street from our Paris apartment, I’ll have a glass of white wine and a plate of fries. It’s an indulgence in every way. Going to the café means quiet time, being alone but surrounded by a hum that I love. And having the fries to myself is a little act of selfishness and a chance to play with my food. I can double or triple dip if I want — mayonnaise has replaced ketchup for me. I can root around and find the crispiest bits that often fall to the bottom of the batch — the ones I usually save for Michael — and I can have them with an extra sprinkle of salt. I couldn’t be further from Brooklyn and cokes from the soda fountain, but there’s always a flicker of that memory.

Fries at Les Éditeurs

Redemption fries

Given how much I love fries and given how much time I spend in the kitchen - also how much time had passed since that early disaster - you’d have thought that I’d eventually come around to making them at home. But I never did. Even though I bought an electric fryer, thinking I just might. But no. And then along came one of my heroes, Michele Norris, who asked me to rethink my reluctance, and I did.

I met Michele Norris in 2006 when she was a host of NPR’s All Things Considered. Baking: From My Home to Yours had just come out, Michele interviewed me about the book and that was the start of a conversation that kept going. Since NPR, Michele has founded The Race Card Project, written the New York Times bestselling Our Hidden Conversations, and created Your Mama’s Kitchen, a podcast that I urge you to listen to — she is one of the most perceptive interviewers working today. Persuasive too. After Michele and I finished our conversation for Your Mama’s Kitchen, she asked if I’d share my recipe for fries. She knew I didn’t have a recipe; knew I hadn’t made them again as an adult and knew that I wasn’t anxious to try. But it was Michele. And when she said that I should think of the recipe as redemption, I relented.

And so, I made redemption fries. Michael and I ate them at the kitchen counter — he dipped his in ketchup, I dipped mine in mayonnaise and we both talked about fries and cokes at Cooky’s.

Make fries. Be careful with that oil! Put them in the center of the table. Let everyone dig in. And dig in again. Also, tell me about your favorite fries — skinny? fat? long? round? Is poutine what you love? And the dip? What’s your go-to? No wrong answers.

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FRENCH FRIES / A Redemption

Photo: Mary Dodd