The Hungry Poet: My Life in Food — A Bag of Chips with Roland Barthes

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Match told us that after the armistice in Indo-China 'General de Castries, for his first meal, asked for chips'.

From ‘Steak and Chips’ by Roland Barthes in Mythologies

There is something victorious about chips. Barthes in his essay Steak and Chips from his collection of essays Mythologies, goes on to suggest that in eating chips after his victory, the General de Catries was asserting his Frenchness and the Frenchness of ‘la frite’. In short, eating chips after his victory was a symbolic act, ‘the alimentary sign of Frenchness’ as Barthes puts it.

Some of my most vivid memories of food involve chips, usually with plenty of salt and vinegar, and often, but not always ketchup – bad salt and bad vinegar I can live with, but bad ketchup, i.e. ketchup that gets the balance of sugar to vinegar wrong, can ruin chips. As a safety precaution I always splurge the ketchup into the corner of the polystyrene tray and use it as a dip as opposed to the ubiquitous Jackson-Pollock street-food pipping approach.

While I’ve had no battles worth celebrating like General de Castries, I’ve always found there to be something victorious about chips, something rewarding about them, and yes, something symbolic. Chips for me have usually come at the end of something, like a prize, humble yet celebratory; celebratory in their humility, humble in their sense of celebration. All of this, yet always, plainly, and simply, and scorchingly, just chips.

To gallop you through my life in chips: there were chips from the van at the end of street on Saturday evening at Gaggy and Granda’s, the chip paper hot and soggy with vinegar and steam and grease; there was the the little paper bag my mother bought my sister and myself from The Golden Fryer as a treat after the shopping at Carryduff shopping centre, which we’d eat in the back of the car; there was a tray of chips in a Ballynahinch high street chippy on the way home after winning a quiz with the Boys’ Brigade; there chips at sports stadiums like Lansdowne Road and Ravenhill eaten on the move and scalding my mouth with some falling on the bare concrete as we rushed to our seats; chips on a picnic bench in Pakefield, Suffolk, with my wife’s family overlooking the sea and overlooked by peckish seagulls; Belgian frites, deep fried in beef fat from a doorway in Paris, with all sorts of little plastic pots of zingy, funky mayonnaises; the chips my mother would cook in the deep fat fryer in the utility room, and bring into the kitchen in a bowl lined with kitchen towel; or the ones she’d cook in a stainless steel pan on the hob in the kitchen and stink the place out even with the induction fan on full blast and the windows open; the chips from the Chip’N, or Old Fryer from Crossgar on those rare occasions we’d get them on a weekday evening when my mother had left it too late to cook; triple cooked chips in various gastro pubs to burying degrees of crispiness; soggy salty cold McDonalds chips in a car park on the way to somewhere, or coming back from somewhere; Country Fried Chicken chips from the place in Downpatrick smothered in a gloopy, more-ish gravy; thick cut chips in a buttered butty from that chip shop, after a few drinks, after a reading at the Poetry Cafe on Betterton Street out of a paper bag standing about outside on the street before the night bus back to Dalston; a dog’s dinner of chips underneath a chicken shish kebab and chilli sauce and mint sauce and salad in an enclosed polystyrene box from Super Kebab on Kingsland High Street; chips from chip vans at festivals where you can add your own salt and vinegar and ketchup from industrial size plastic bottles with caked nozzles; fish and chips from the cash-only Reeves in Abingdon, our go-to, on a Friday night and served at home with petits pois cooked from frozen in a bowl of water in the microwave; and, finally, my own invention, what I call ‘house chips’, my oven cooked Maris Piper chips, cooked in a glug of sunflower oil and seasoned with salt and pepper and cooked on 200C for about an hour, which are more cube like than chip like with sausages on Thursday nights, with chicken schnitzel on Friday nights, with steak and pepper sauce on Saturday nights.

The best chips I’ve ever had were undoubtedly the Belgian frites in Paris cooked in beef fat, however I love my kids and arteries too much to have these more than once every five years. I have however perfected a – what I would term – sustainable chip recipe which involves little fat and a modest amount of seasoning and goes with pretty much everything; it’s also quick and easy to prepare and gives that balance of crispness on the outside, softness on the inside (armadillo!) which is paramount for any victorious chip experience.

RECIPE

Serves 4

• Maris Piper potatoes (about 6 depending on the size; basically you want enough to fill a large over tray when cubed, so the amount will depend on how many you’re feeding and also the size of your oven tray)

• Sunflower oil

1. Cube the Maris Pipers into fairly large cubes.

2. Drizzle with sunflower oil on an oven tray - enough to coat all of the chips but they should not be swimming in oil, particularly as this makes cleaning up more annoying.

3. Season with ground salt and black pepper and mix with your hands to ensure every chip has some oil and seasoning on it.

4. Put in the oven at 200C for about an hour, taking them out about halfway through to turn them over, otherwise the bottom will be incredibly crispy and the top will be soft. If you forget to do this it’s not great harm, but for the optimum crispiness I’d recommend turning them over.

5. Serve with anything you like or eat them on your own, by yourself – I wouldn’t judge you. If you’re feeling decadent you throw some extra sea salt flakes over them at the end for an additional salty kick.