This is just one of the many multi-cultural food booths found at the Stanislaus County Fair in Turlock, California. The fair food booths serve as a great example of how cultures have become mish-mashed in the United States. We adopt specific foods and flavors from other cultures and make them as American as possible. This booth served curly fries, nachos and Greek gyros all out of the same trailer.
Think about how bland America's culinary choices would be if we had stopped all immigration to the country 200 years ago.
3 comments:
My question is where the heck did the curly fry come from? Other than sounding like something the 3 Stooges would have eaten, it seems that the origin of the curly fry as opposed to the french fry (aka freedom fry) is strictly from some fast food franchise's imagination. In fact, I'm not even sure how they get curly since cut raw potatoes are fairly stiff. This would make them a close cousin of the chicken nugget (I don't even want to think about what part of the chicken that must be).
Food miscegenation actually has worked pretty well in the South. Cajun food and Tex-Mex now seem to be their own cuisines and occasionally get time on the Food Network. It's my hope that curly fries never make it out of the fast food world though.
They make them curly by basic using a giant potato shaver that cuts the potato in a circular fashion. Not really sure where the idea came from, but when I was a student at Chico State, a long-established restaurant there known as The Bear claimed to have invented the curly fry. Of course, that was more than 20 years ago, but at the time I had never seen a curly fry until I ate at that restaurant, so I guess it's possible.
So Chico is not only on the way to Paradise, but it's also where they invented the curly fry? Some day, food anthropologists will get a grant to hang out at the Bear and trace the origins and transmission of the curly fry.
Even though I'm not supposed to eat them. I just wish they'd do french fries well which when it happens is hard to resist.
The curly fry absorbs more oil and never seems to have any texture. It's like a non-animal cousin of the fishwich (which fish is it?) and the chicken nugget. The French should have invaded the US a long time ago for stocking up on WMD, weapons of meal destruction, and threatening to spread them across the world.
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