Andy Richardson: Call in the Food Standards Agency!
My friend won’t eat chips unless they’re smothered in cheese. And not just any cheese. For her, it has to be maximum plastic white stuff, you know, the sort of stuff that melts like plastic – and probably was made of plastic. If it’s not white and rubbery, like some sort of waste product from a dairy or a tyre factory, she doesn’t want to know.
“You ought to try cheesy chips,” she told me. “I have,” I replied. “I had triple cooked chips drizzled with truffle oil and scattered with 24-month shavings of DOP parmesan.”
She baulked.
“Snob.”
There was a time when chips were simply fried pieces of potato. It was a happy time. It’s a time to which we ought to return.
For it seems that these days, the ability to procure chips with salt and vinegar is rarer than painite. And as everyone knows, the orangish or reddish brown gem stone that is painite has hardly been mined since it was first discovered in Burma in the ‘50s. Only few hundred faceted stones exist.
There is a three-letter phrase that sums up such abuse against the humble edible tuber: Crimes Against Potatoes. But my friend isn’t the only person committing such heinous acts. It seems those of us who are in thrall to the humble fry are in an ever-decreasing minority.
For no more can we enjoy chips that are golden on the outside, light and fluffy within and break with a small puff of starchy steam – these days, we have to pimp them with an ever-increasing array of toppings and sides.
If chips aren’t covered with cheese, chilli and pulled pork, they’re not fit to wear the name – or so foodies would tell you.
Worse still are our brothers and sisters on the distant side of the Atlantic who insist on drenching them in gravy and cheese. Foodies in Quebec were to blame for Poutine, the dish of French fries, cheese curds and gravy that emerged in the late 1950s and is now so fashionable that there are poutine shacks in Birmingham. I kid you not.
I love food. I love innovation. But when it comes to messing with chips – or, as I have started to call it, Crimes Against Potato – I just don’t get it. For surely the joy of a great bag of chips is the fact they’ve got a little crunch. The outer coating, made nice and crisp in a deep fryer, is the principle joy of eating them. It’s surely not the starch within. You don’t see people walking around the streets nibbling on raw potatoes. So it can’t be. Case closed.
Now here’s the rub. If you drench chips in gravy, stringy plastic cheese, a fruity tomato passata, chilli or, god forbid, cheese curd, they lose their crunch. And then they’re not a chip. They’re a soggy, unloved, woe-begotten piece of potato. And nobody likes that. The Food Standards Agency was set up to investigate crimes against food. But I don’t reckon it’s doing its job properly. After all, where is a Government-funded quango when you need it and your chips are drenched in gravy? We don’t see public health campaigns warning people against the consumption of chilli-coated dirty fries, now do we?
And before we drop this 600-words-in-and-still-going-strong rant based on Crimes Against Potato, we ought not to imagine we’re the only ones that suffer. In Thailand, a race that gave us the beautiful massaman curry has been converted to the craze of smothering fried potato with cheese – though in their case, they do it more daintly by cutting the cheese into small triangles and gently draping those pyramids across the chips.
Chips aren’t the only food that have been subjected to indecency. Lest we forget what our Scottish cousins did to the humble Mars Bar. Step away from the fryer, Jack (that, Google has just told me, is the most popular boys’ name in Scotland) – and do not coat the Mars Bar with batter.
In America, there is a food experiment that seeks to combine the best of Chinese and Italian food. It is called pizza chow mein. And it works something like this. Make a huge, calorie-filled pizza, then dump a whole portion of chow mein in the middle. Now wrap the pizza around the chow mein then slice it in half – just like an M&S health option wrap. Disgusting doesn’t cover it.
The people on Twitter have conducted unbelievable acts of violence against gin’n’tonic. In the absence of ice from their freezer, they have dropped pieces of frozen potato into their aperitifs. The French have devised a beef sausage croissant. Work it out yourselves. While one Glasgow take-away sent out raw onions, chopped in half and popped into circles when a customer ordered onion rings. Geddit. But nothing beats the Scottish delicacy – why is it always Scotland – that is the Nutella and toasted cheese sandwich. Quick, call the food police. Someone’s committed a crime.
