MY friend and I perusing the restaurant menu let out a simultaneous exclamation. “O…M…G!” ‘Fat chips’, it reads, ‘twice cooked in beef dripping’.
Regardless of the fact we’re both opting for rice-based dishes, we order a portion. They are cut thick, tawny-coloured and glistening crisp without, floury within and permeated with a flavour that vegetable oils cannot replicate. Trouble is, there are only three each. We consume them slowly, sighing ecstatically, savouring every bite.
Last week, culinary queen Mary Berry lost the run of herself entirely. “No home should own a deep fat fryer,” she opined. Since I’ve never had one in the first place, her imperious dictum should’ve been irrelevant, but I can’t be doing with the thin and self-righteous.
What I do possess, long forgotten in the darkest recesses of the furthest cobweb-festooned corner cupboard of the futility room, is a chip pan, complete with chip basket. It’s blackened, battered and hasn’t been used in twenty years, but it was my mother’s and brings back treasured cholesterol-laden memories.
I’d fairly leg it home from school on Fridays, the relief from a week’s learning enhanced by the prospect of chips for tea. You could smell them as you got off the school bus. The whole street was frying. I’d stick my nose through our letterbox and inhale the aroma of hot fat.
Every housewife in those days drained the meat juices from the Sunday roast into an enamel bowl, where they separated and solidified into a dense grey mass with a thick brown sediment on the bottom.
This concentrated richness was turned out into the chip pan where it liquefied and sulked, augmented if necessary, with a generous lump of lard or a newfangled substance called ‘Cookeen’.
Meanwhile, I was put to peeling potatoes while mother waited impatiently with the lethally sharp vegetable knife to cut them into uniform sticks, plunge them into cold water, dry them off in a clean tea-towel and put them in the chip basket.
When the fat began to shimmer and spit, the basket was gingerly lowered into the pan where it bubbled and rose in a froth to the very lip.
A mushroom cloud of steam and smoke billowed up and the kitchen became a blue haze. Mother would shake the pan as I set the table and when the chips were pale gold, lift the basket out, resting it on the side of the pan for a few minutes before lowering it again for a final browning.
Liberally salted and splashed with Sarson’s malt vinegar, chips marked the start of the weekend and all its delights – the pocket-money, the visit to the library, the Saturday matinée and playing outside till dark.
I never ate a ‘bought’ chip till I was woman big. In my day, chips were the perpetually famished student staple. Though we had perfectly adequate cooking facilities, we’d run back to our freezing flat, warming our hands on the hot parcels.
They never got as far as a plate. We’d eat them out of their newspaper wrappings while waiting for the coals to catch in the newly-lit fire. (Naturally, they tasted best out of the ‘Irish News’). Today’s students are just as dilatory – but with greater choice.
The chip pan went out of fashion when cooking smells were suddenly deemed offensive. We all bought extractor fans, Yankee candles and scent diffusers and became scared witless by dire warnings about clogged arteries and kitchen infernos too, the switch to vegetable oil marked a change in flavour – not the same unctuous taste at all – no depth in it.
The native domestic chip was usurped by chip-shop chips (unreliable in quality,) ‘skinny fries’ (surely a contradiction in terms?) and oven chips (an aberrant abomination.) I transferred my allegiance to garlic potatoes.
Despite the current fad for ‘clean eating’ the ubiquitous chip is not dead. Only now they’re ‘naughty’. At a table of five ladies-who-lunch, four will ask for a virtuous tossed salad as a side order and then lean over and pinch the fifth one’s chips. Not if they’re mine, ladies.
