The first time I ordered a pastie supper ─ a pastie with chips ─ I was 13 and got it because I didn’t have enough change for anything more expensive.
Essentially a croquette disguised as a monstrosity. Like many other Northern Irish dishes (boxty, jambon, fifteens), they are a phenomenon, and therefore entirely unknown in the rest of the UK. Often with the addition of pink colouring which turns the meat the colour of a packet of Prawn Cocktail crisps.
CHEAP FISH AND CHIPS NEAR ME DRIVER
The thickness as it sank down my throat, puddled at the bottom of my gut, making me wonder when might be a good time to tell the taxi driver that he’s going to have to pull over because I’m about to throw up.Ī pastie, not to be confused with a Cornish pasty, is meat, potatoes, herbs and spices shaped into a patty then battered and fried. Each burger was too light and airy in my mouth, it felt like cloud food. I ended up following my friends into the golden arches. I was on a smoke-filled dancefloor listening to a dubstep remix of Adele's Set Fire to the Rain when I felt the big hole opening up in me again, growling for a fatberg-sized mound of carbs. When you get up to leave you have to bend over to make extra space for the meal to sit in your stomach.Īfter my first year of university I headed back to my parent’s house in Leeds. Set in a new context, the flavours of Bolognese chips get down on their knees and crawl down to deeper levels. In this case: potato where there should be pasta, meat sauce where there should be ketchup. You tend to notice flavours more when they’re paired with something they shouldn’t go with. Greasy and meaty, Bolognese chips involves one layer of thick-cut chips, a layer of cheese, a layer of Bolognese sauce, and then a final layer of cheese, all heated up in the microwave for thirty seconds. When I’m in London this means a chicken shish with extra garlic sauce as a student in Newcastle, this meant Bolognese chips. On some nights, when there’s a big hole opening up wide and furious in your stomach you need to fill lit with what it needs. Each of the following 19 dishes is local history on a polystyrene tray (even if that history is someone working out the cheapest and most economical way to feed lots of drunk students on a night out).īolognese chips ─ Newcastle, by Annie Lord
Like other national dishes ─ ramen, pho, pizza, barbecue ─ fish and chips is hyper-regional ─ the fact that it’s just different things deep fried in batter doesn’t change this. The level I’m interested in is further down traditions that are specific to a county, or to a city, or to a part of a city, or perhaps even to a single chip shop, regional traditions that sometimes we don’t even realise are regional traditions until we leave our homes and can’t find them, or until we live in another city and realise what we’ve been missing. However, that’s not what today’s newsletter about. Linguistically too ─ fish and chips or fish suppers chippies, chip shops or chippers, these are all broadly regional variants that each of us insist is the correct version.
You can define whole swathes of countries by whether they know what scraps or a potato scallop is. Then the third level is the fish substitutes: sausage in batters, saveloys, smokies, puddings and pies. Go down a level and you have condiments : the south doesn’t understand wetness and is content with mayo and ketchup, but in Wales and the north you have lineages of gravy and curry sauce, with vinegary brown sauce the condiment of choice in Scotland. Chips are differentiated by the type of cooking fat beef dripping traditionally, especially in the north, while the south, particularly London, prefers a blonder chip (perhaps the influence of Cypriots who stewarded the national dish and brought a fresher, Mediterranean frying style). In the Inception of regional fish and chips, the first level is the fish and chips itself ─ fishing patterns and taste tends to carve Britain and Ireland into cod and haddock, with skate and rock perhaps more common in the south than the north.
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