What's Elizabeth Reading? ...Blake Lingle

The last book I reviewed for my job at the Idaho Press-Tribune: "Fries! An Illustrated Guide to the World's Favorite Food."

Sounds prestigious, no?

Well what if I told you it was written by Blake Lingle, co-owner of the Boise Fry Company, which U.S. News placed at the top of a list of the ten top fry makers in America?

You can read what I wrote for the newspaper here. It gives a pretty good idea of what sort of book it is (humorous, informational, conversational) and the information it contains (did you know that Thomas Jefferson might have been the person who first brought fries to America?).

I read this book in two sittings. It is an easy read, not a work of great literature, but enlightening just the same. Not every book needs to be a literary marvel, after all.


I will say this for the book: A couple days later, I used Lingle's algorithm for fry making in my own kitchen. I fudged on a bunch of it, because I didn't want the process to take an entire day (literally; pre-fry freezing time is 12-24 hours), but mostly stuck to what he said. The resulting fries tasted like fries.

If you think about how many things people try to copy off restaurants and get wrong, you may realize this is a small miracle. My husband was less impressed; he said my fries tasted just like the ones he grew up making by just slicing up a potato and throwing it straight in the deep fryer.

Either way, my faith has been marginally restored in the fast food industry. I had always figured fries were mostly chemicals and not much potato, but it turns out that even if that is true, the taste is spot-on.

The Boise Fry Company does gourmet fries, from what I gather. The website urges people to pick their potato (Russet? Purple? Yam? Brussels sprout?) and cut (Shoestring? Regular? Curly?). They have many different sauces, and the cuts and types of fry vegetable change daily.

So no, this book does not just cover conventional fries. Nor, sadly, is it a cook book, though there is a recipe here or there. It is an informational book set into easy sections of history, where fries come from, and others, and interrupts itself often with lists, instructions or that algorithm I mentioned earlier, which is a graphic that takes up two pages.

Read it if you want to know more about fries than you have ever thought of asking about. Also read it if you have an interest in contemporary book formatting, because it is not regular in that sense (by that, I refer to all those interruptions. They are full-page interruptions, set apart from the main text).

And keep fries handy while you read, because you'll find yourself craving some sooner or later.