Have you ever had a bag of chips from a chippie that cooks in the good old fashioned way, using Beef Dripping to cook the chips, instead of the modernist Vegetable Oil?
If you haven't, buddy, you ain't lived.
In those golden times before every fecking thing you ate was poisonous or at least dangerous, food actually used to taste of something.
It's been a hell of a long time now, so most of you wouldn't remember, but thankfully, I'm quite old.
I can quite clearly remember how delicious chips were, cooked in Beef Dripping, plastered in salt and vinegar and wrapped up in newspaper. Even better were the Batter Bits (odd shaped left-over scatterings of batter that had been tipped into the fryer). Batter Bits were often just given away free with your chips as a bit of a treat.
Eating a bag of chips in the street was fantastic. You tore away at one end of the wrapped up chips. I wonder why it was always known as a “bag” of chips when no-one ever used a bag back then, but nonetheless, a bag of chips it was and is.
School dinner-breaks on cold winter days were actually a delight thanks to eating a lovely bag of chips from one end of the bag. Total concentration. As you and your mates wandered back towards school, blowing on your fingers as they absorbed the heat from the chips. Steam rose from the opening, filling your nose and making your other senses useless as your single-minded determination to get every last delicious morsel out of the bag took priority over everything else.
Those precious days are gone, it seems, forever, and not just for me but for everyone. We live in a society and time where you're not allowed to eat things with any real taste to them. This is of course because of fats and cholesterols and healthy lifestyles and such nonsense.
How long before your local chippie is barred from offering you salt on your chips?
Things have gone too far to be redeemed now and I may as well acknowledge that I've gotta give up this, that, and the bloody other, whether I want to or not. The things that make me mortal and who I am are the things that I enjoy and have enjoyed. Eventually, we will all be identical and live without salt, sugar, milk, butter, chocolate, eggs, chocolate eggs, alcohol and sex. It's a future we allow to creep upon us, like a slowly moving shadow, crossing the land. A future that I simply don't care for but must accept.
We had to say goodbye to another outpost of the past today. A place of deliciousness which has succumbed to the inevitable.
My wife, Jo and I were out shopping and having not yet eaten for the day, decided on the age old love of Traditional Fish & Chips.
There is (or rather was) a great little chippie in the High Street of Blackheath, Rowley Regis called, rather smashingly, “Batter-Bits”. The name itself won me over instantly with its tug-of-love to the past. What was amazing about “Batter-Bits” was that they cooked their chips in Beef Dripping. Jo and her Mom used “Batter-Bits” every week as part of their shopping ritual together, often bringing back a bag of Fish & Chips for me.
It was always delicious. Beautiful chips. Beautiful Fish in exquisite batter. Fabulous Peas and fabulous gravy.
So we popped in there today for a sit-down meal of Fish & Chips, Peas & Gravy. I was so looking forward to it that I could hardly wait to park the car.
We walked into the shop expecting to see Chris & Gemma, the girls who work there but instead received a greeting from the new owner, an Asian gentleman with a neatly sculptured goaty & tosh.
“Good afternoon Sir, Madame, can I help you?......”
Jo and I looked at each other. “Where's the.... er ….. lady?” Jo enquired.
“Lady is here!” said he. “She in back” and he pointed toward the rear of the property to where the back kitchen area was.
We looked but could not see either of the girls we knew, only other young Asian men wandering about trying to look like they knew what they were doing.
Under New Ownership read the sign. Hmmm.
“Do you still fry in Dripping?”
“No Mate.... Dripping no good. Not healthy. You need look after yourself Ennit? Healthy Lifestyle Choices Ennit”
“Hmmm.... Mate. Listen” I offered a little advice of my own. “I made a Lifestyle Choice when I came into this shop with the intention of eating Fish & Chips....... Ennit”.
I didn't continue with the discussion as, as much as I enjoy preaching, I know instinctively when my congregation ain't listening.
We ordered our meal regardless of the expected disappointment, hoping against hope that it would be what we wanted.
It wasn't.
The chips, although the equal to any chips you can buy elsewhere in Blackheath, were just that.
Just the Equal. No longer The Best.
And there ain't no use in complaining because I can't back up my argument with data and statistics. I have the whole horrid pansy-mamby-pamby brigade against me and only my opinion for me.
I used that Chippie because I loved the REAL TASTE that touched my soul and reminded me of my childhood.
I made a lifestyle choice about cholesterol before I entered a fecking Fish & Chip shop. I don't want this or any other healthy choice. I want to be able to make a taste choice. There are 3 other Chip Shops in Blackheath, all already cooking in Vegetable Oil. I already had that choice and had made my choice.
So. I will submit. I will give up another of those things that please me because someone, somewhere has decided that I need a healthy choice which in the end means I have no choice at all.
Goodbye “Batter-Bits”. As a great man once wrote, “....... goodbye...... and thanks for all the fish.
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