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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.
No we are not attributing fries to the Belgian, fries are french. The Belgian improved on our invention and make the best fries, but Frenchs invented it.
Content warning, a lot of french: https://www.musee-gourmandise.be/fr/musee-gourmandise/articles-de-fond?view=article&id=132:la-veritable-histoire-de-la-frite&catid=77:articles-fond
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.
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 😔
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
Also here we call it "cafetière à piston" not french press.
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.
No idea what a French press is. Probably a cafetière ?
Seems to be one and the same
Who the hell calls it a French press, I've never heard anyone call it that.
I never knew there was a different name for it. The cafetière is a new one on me, and I did French in high school. Guess we weren't talking about coffee much, though apparently french fries came up enough for me to remember pommes frites (they probably don't fry apples much over there).
The US calls everything "French" because they think it'll sell better.
Until we collectively decided to be jerks about it in the early 2000s and called them "freedom fries" and "freedom toast." I think it's so weird that we're closer to the British than the French when France totally helped us out in the early days.
Yeah, I think so too, Japan does the same with food and luxury shops.
Anglo-Saxon cultural elements
You did your best to stamp those out back in 1066
It's still how we call this group from France.
Do you use it differently to "English"?
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.
Interesting. I'd probably call that "the anglosphere", Anglo-Saxon is specifically the pre-Norman-conquest residents of what is now England.
Wouldn't the Anglosphere include every English speaking countries like South Africa, India and others?
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).