Julienne is a culinary knife cut in which the food

Food

Food is any substance consumed to provide nutritional support for the body. It is usually of plant or animal origin, and contains essential nutrients, such as carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, or minerals...

 item is cut into long thin strips, not unlike matchsticks. Sometimes called 'shoe string', e.g. 'shoestring fries'. Common items to be julienned are carrot

Carrot

The carrot is a root vegetable, usually orange in colour, though purple, red, white, and yellow varieties exist. It has a crisp texture when fresh...

s for carrots Julienne, celery

Celery

Apium graveolens is a plant species in the family Apiaceae commonly known as celery or celeriac , depending on whether the petioles or roots are eaten: celery refers to the former and celeriac to the latter. Apium graveolens grows to 1 m tall...

 for Céléris Remoulade

Remoulade

Remoulade or rémoulade, invented in France, is a popular condiment in many countries. Very much like the tartar sauce of some English-speaking cultures, remoulade is often aioli- or mayonnaise-based. Although similar to tartar sauce, it is often more yellowish , often flavored with curry, and...

or potato

Potato

The potato is a starchy, tuberous crop from the perennial Solanum tuberosum of the Solanaceae family . The word potato may refer to the plant itself as well as the edible tuber. In the region of the Andes, there are some other closely related cultivated potato species...

es for Julienne Fries.

With a sharp knife the raw vegetable is sliced to length and trimmed on four sides to create a thick rectangular

Rectangle

In Euclidean plane geometry, a rectangle is any quadrilateral with four right angles. The term "oblong" is occasionally used to refer to a non-square rectangle...

 stick 6-7 cm long, then cut lengthwise into thin (1-2 mm) slices. Stacking these slices and again cutting lengthwise into thin (1-2 mm, equal to the thickness) strips creates thin uniform square sticks. Julienne usually applies to vegetables prepared in this way but it can also be applied to the preparation of meat

Meat

Meat is animal flesh that is used as food. Most often, this means the skeletal muscle and associated fat and other tissues, but it may also describe other edible tissues such as organs and offal...

 or fish

Fish

Fish are a paraphyletic group of organisms that consist of all gill-bearing aquatic vertebrate animals that lack limbs with digits. Included in this definition are the living hagfish, lampreys, and cartilaginous and bony fish, as well as various extinct related groups...

, especially in stir fry techniques.

Once julienned, turning the subject 90 degrees and dicing finely (again 1-2 mm, equal to other dimensions) will produce brunoise

Brunoise

Brunoise is a culinary knife cut in which the food item is first julienned and then turned a quarter turn and diced again, producing cubes of a side length of about 3 mm or less on each side or 1/6 inch cubes. In France, a "brunoise" cut is smaller, 1 to 2 mm on each side. Common items to be...

.

The first known use of the term in print

Printing

Printing is a process for reproducing text and image, typically with ink on paper using a printing press. It is often carried out as a large-scale industrial process, and is an essential part of publishing and transaction printing....

 is in François Massialot's

François Massialot

François Massialot was a French chef who served as chef de cuisine to various illustrious personages, including Philippe I, Duke of Orléans, the brother of Louis XIV, and his son Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, who was first duc de Chartres then the Regent, as well as the duc d'Aumont, the Cardinal...

 Le Cuisinier Royal et Bourgeois (1722 edition). The origin

Etymology

Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages and texts about the languages to gather knowledge about how words were used during...

 of the term is uncertain, but may derive from the proper name

Proper name

"A proper name [is] a word that answers the purpose of showing what thing it is that we are talking about" writes John Stuart Mill in A System of Logic , "but not of telling anything about it"...

 Jules or Julien. In Alexandre Viard's Le Cuisinier Royal

Le Cuisinier Impérial

A[lexandre] Viard's Le Cuisinier Impérial was a culinary encyclopedia that passed through at least thirty-two editions in its long career as the essential reference work for the French professional chef during the nineteenth century. During its long run it was a staple of its publisher, J.-N...

, 10th edition (1820), a potage julienne is composed of carrots, beets, leeks, celery, lettuce, sorrel, and chervil cut in strips a half-ligne

Ligne

The ligne is a unit of length that was in use prior to the French adoption of the metric system in the late 18th century, and is still used by French and Swiss wristwatch makers to measure the size of a watch movement.- Watchmakers' use :There are 12 lignes to one French inch...

in thickness and about eight or ten lignes in length. The onions are cut in half and sliced thinly to give curved sections, the lettuce and sorrel minced, in what a modern recipe would term en chiffonade

Chiffonade

Chiffonade is a cooking technique in which herbs or leafy green vegetables are cut into long, thin strips. This is generally accomplished by stacking leaves, rolling them tightly, then cutting across the rolled leaves with a sharp knife, producing fine ribbons."Chiffon" is French for "rag"...

. The root vegetables are briefly sauteed, then all are simmered in stock and the julienne is ladled out over a slice of bread.