Sure, I am Always Talkin’ Food, but I teach NT2 (Dutch as a second language) on the side. Mainly to young internationals who came to Amsterdam for or with love and intend to stay. For privacy reasons the names in these columns are fictitious.
We need to talk about false friends.
Having them around in our daily life is already very pesky, but when learning a new language, false friends are downright annoying.
We’re talkin’ words in one language that are the spitting image of a word from another language.
That is, in spelling, not in meaning.
Words that are just feigning to be friends.
Weirdly enough false friends and valse vrienden themselves are by no means false friends, these terms mean exactly the same thing in either language.
Between German and Dutch exist many false friends, but you find them also between Dutch and English and even between Dutch and Flemish.
Let’s take an example close to my heart: patat. In much of the Netherlands this is the word for freshly deep-fried potato sticks, called friet in the rest of our country (friet patat, potayto potahto - it’s a bit of a controversy here).
In Flanders, on the other hand, patat is just the raw ingredient for this popular snack called fritten (or frieten) there.
For the full picture, friet in French is pommes frites and in German simply Pommes.
Now let’s take it one step further to chips and crisps. The former are in the UK what in the Netherlands is friet or patat. The latter, crisps, are what the Dutch call chips, extremely thin potato slices that are usually not freshly deep-fried and are eaten cold.
Still there?
In the States you’ll look in vain for crisps in the supermarket. Instead, you score a family bag of potato chips, while in the diner you don’t order chips, nor pommes frites, but french fries with your burger or steak.
’Last weekend I ordered my steak raar,’ Customer success manager Shiv from the US recalls an example from her life in Amsterdam. ‘It made the Dutch waiter look weirdly at me.’
Me (jokingly): ‘Ik zou jou ook raar aankijken.’ (I would look weirdly at you too.)
Now Shiv in turn looks weirdly at me.
’Raar is not rare, it’s plain weird,’ I elaborate on this false friendship.
Beware of false friends. En bewaar ze niet. (Don't keep them.)
Patatlingo**
Het patatje met - French fries with mayo
De mayonaise - Mayonnaise, the classic topping on patat
De fritessaus - A Dutch invention which the Flemish rightly detest
Het patatje pinda(saus) - French fries with satay/peanut sauce
Het patatje oorlog - French fries with satay sauce, chopped onions and ketchup
De kapsalon - French fries topped with shawarma meat, grilled cheese and lettuce
De luciferfriet - French fries as thinly sliced as matches (steppegras in Flemish)
De luiewijvenfriet - French fries made of unpealed potatoes (by ‘lazy housewives’)
De raspatat - A northern variant made of potato powder
* Where I write patat I also mean friet, and where it says french fries I also mean chips
* To end the never-ending controversy between patat and friet, a Dutch snack writer now refers to the snack as frietpatat
Frietpatat
People who know me, know that patat is one of my absolute favourite foods since I can say friet. And I already tipped great addresses here, here and here. After Flemish fries were the chips of choice for decades, now luiewijvenfriet is totally trending in Amsterdam’s TikTok queues.
Many restaurants also serve this variant, often produced by Frietboutique, which is in that case explicitly mentioned on the menu as a quality warranty.
My fave topping is satay sauce (pindasaus). But I gladly dip my homemade fries in gravy, if available. And when in Flanders, I order looksaus (garlic sauce) or tartaarsaus.
For the record: patat is made from potatoes. All other fries are false fries.