Eddie’s Food Pet Peeves: Those Limp, Soggy Fries in Southern Europe
Adeline (nickname: Eddie) loves food—lots of it, often, both at home and out. Usually, things go well, but sometimes they don’t. In the series Eddie’s Food Pet Peeves, you can read about the latter. This time: limp fries at your holiday destination.
I’ll leave the question of whether they’re called chips or fries aside for now. I started life calling them chips, but switched to fries after dating someone from Brabant. So that’s possible too, instead of a civil war over what they should be called. But I really do need to discuss the fries of southern Europe with you. I’ve just returned from two months under the Greek sun and have very little to complain about, except that I’ve never been served so many limp fries as I was there.
The limp, soggy, filthy misery. It’s incomprehensible.
Nothing to fry
During those more than two months in which I treated myself to the occasional portion of fries, they were hanging around just as pathetically everywhere. You could see the misery coming from a distance. The waiter would stride towards the table, wave a plate of fries around a bit, and from their pale-yellow, undercooked colour you already knew. This is simply inedible.
If you were unlucky, they were served underneath the rest of your food, which meant they weren’t just limp but also covered in gravy. Yes, I already said it was really, really bad. It almost seems as though limp fries are a Mediterranean speciality.
Nice and glassy and soaked through
Now, limp is already a mortal sin, but soggy is just a little bit worse. “What kind of fries?” “Well, make them nice and glassy, thoroughly limp and, if possible, completely soaked through, please.” With the limp ones, you occasionally get a tiny stroke of luck: at the bottom of the bowl, there may still be a few crispy casualties. But if those are also WET, there really is nothing left to fry about those fries.
Eating out 60 times
I found exactly one—I repeat, one—place on the entire island where they were okay-ish. Bear in mind that I ate out roughly 60 (!) times, usually for both lunch and dinner. I completely surrendered myself to the divine gift of Mediterranean cuisine, indeed. My jeans no longer fit anywhere near closed either, but that’s food for another time.
Or maybe that’s exactly it? Everything you put in your mouth there is so insanely delicious that the fries no longer matter. It’s pure self-preservation, because otherwise it wouldn’t just be the top two buttons of your jeans that would no longer fasten.
Either way, I think it’s a limp excuse.
Read also:
- If you shudder at bits in your food
- Why some people shouldn’t be allowed to use a self-checkout
- The grossest dining scene ever in a restaurant
