Pie and Chips - A disappointment - Still a favourite??

Last night I took advantage of the wife (get your head out of the gutter) who was out and about at the Chapter Arts cinema watching ‘The Danish Girl’ with a friend. I had a yearning for something I hadn’t had for a while some pie and chips from the chippy it was not an impulsive kind of thought because it has been stewing in my head since she bought the tickets days ago. The chippy was not far off the way home so I put in an order with the wife.

Was I impressed with the offering? No not really. First, the pie, which the wife made the cardinal sin of not asking for it to be separate from the chips. Luckily even with the pie coming from the Victoria Pie Shop and doesn’t come in a foil pie tray it held up well. The chips were awful! They were mostly small and shrivelled up as if they had been cooked for a while and there were a lot of bits. Back in my day we called bits ‘scraps’ which was small pieces of batter and pieces of chips left in the oil after frying. Sometimes you could get a small bag of scraps for free or for a penny.

The wife will be back at the Chapter Arts in a few weeks and I think I will give the Chippy the miss and have a homemade pie and chips.

There was a time that the Chippy would have been the first port of call for a takeaway but times have changed. Call me old fashioned but today’s Chippy can be scary with the massive menus were they sell everything under the sun like kebabs, fried chicken products, burgers, pizzas and just about anything you can think of that is way beyond my ideal chippy. Some use frozen chips to cut corners and most now use polystyrene boxes instead of newspaper to not wrap your chips up.

I remember the time when the most exotic item on the menu of a chippy was roast chicken and fish. As a Docks lad, I was a frequent visitor to the local chippies in my youth. Locally we had three shops in walking distance from my home all three to fall victim to the bulldozers during the regeneration of the area.

Fish and chip shops were a handy watering hole to load up on a relatively cheap meal with just a bag of chips being very fulling. Back then, it was cheap but today not so. Payday was a popular day, Friday back then, you were paid in cash, and the ques in the chippies were always that bit longer.