The Hungry Poet: My Life in Food — Gravy Chips from the Chinese, for Lunch

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"Did I eat too many gravy chips growing up?" is a question it's only occurred to me to ask, approaching forty and shuffling ever more subtly off this mortal coil. Googling photos of the dish, if I can call it that, to feature at the top of this post, almost made me want to retch.

The idea of gravy on chips, or gravy chips as we’d call them, goes way back. Poutine, considered Canada’s National dish and apparently originating from Quebec in the 1950s, is a plate of chips covered in gravy and cheese curds (yes, curds!). Variations of this, such as Poppy O’Toole’s on the BBC Food website, replaces the curds with mozzarella, and to be honest I don’t know which to be more sceptical of. Growing up in Northern Ireland, not only was a gravy chip a popular dish in all chippies, but it was served in school canteens up and down the country. I vividly remember it being my lunchtime staple for many years at school, served as it was in shallow white polystyrene trays. The beauty of it was that, as it was relatively inexpensive (probably about a quid or just over back in the early noughties) you could buy a tray of it and still have money left for a Mars Bar from the ‘vendies’ i.e. the vending machines out of your £1.50 lunch money. But you had to wait until Wednesday to have accumulated the requisite change. When we got to the sixth form, and were allowed ‘down the street’ for our lunch we’d traipse down in unison, ordering out gravy chips from the Chinese, which offered a better depth of flavour than the canteen equivalent. It was also a gloosier and stickier kind of gravy which sat on the the chips like a dark brown velvety blanket which sounds disgusting but tasted great.

Comfort Food

At any rate, it was a very comforting thing to have on what was an invariably, boring, grey, damp school day in County Down. The chips were the frozen variety (the ones made of reconstituted potato, I seem to recall) deep fried and ladled with a translucent, salty brown liquid which in viscosity would differ from day to day, depending on who made it (I say ‘made’ but it was clearly Bisto gravy granules or the like mixed with hot water), how many granules had been added, and how long it had been sitting out and at what temperature. I was never a huge fan of the dark brown lumps you’d get either. 

At some takeaway outlets such as Country Fried Chicken, a franchise which popped up here and there in the county, the gravy they served was a much lighter shade of brown, and much thicker, and it has to be said, more flavoursome. I suspect it was made more like a traditional gravy using chicken stock and flour, perhaps with some other ingredients to give it its distinctive colour and flavour. The gravy could be ordered in addition to the chips, in its own little lidded circular polystyrene tub, to be poured over at the patron’s whimsy and discretion.

Poutine

The idea of adding cheese to gravy chips, a la poutine, seems incredibly decadent, but perhaps it simply predates our current days of ‘dirty fries’ or ‘loaded fries’ where french fries are covered in all manner of stews, chillis, pulled pork, jalapeno peppers and cheeses and sauces, served in neat, compact open-top cardboard boxes. This would suggest that as long as we’ve had chips we’ve always wanted something to lavish them in, even if it’s just salt and vinegar. 

The derivation of the word ‘poutine’ they think comes from the English word ‘pudding’ but as in ‘mess’ such as Eton Mess. Gravy and chips for pudding anyone?

School Dinners

I sincerely hope school dinners have improved in state schools in Northern Ireland since those days. Having taught English at a couple of public schools in England I can safely tell you that gravy on chips was not on the menu. Much credit should go to Jamie Oliver for bringing the topic of school dinners to the attention of us all and how for too long they simply weren’t good enough. As much as I enjoyed gravy on chips, I definitely shouldn’t have been eating it everyday for lunch. 

Unhealthy options like that simply weren’t on offer at the private schools I worked at (where an additional salad bar was de rigeur); now maybe this was due to it being about 10 or 15 years hence, and maybe it was to do with advancements in standards and maybe even government legislation or whatever, but I can’t help feeling it’s also in part to do with class and money. More has been done recently with free school meals and allowing children from disadvantaged backgrounds to have at least one solid meal per day. Everyone should be entitled to a well balanced hot meal per day in this country.

I try not to think about the number of polystyrene trays of gravy chips I went through and maybe it’s not worth thinking about. 

Now what’s for poutine?