I am laying out frozen McCain chips on a baking sheet while the oven preheats to 200 degrees – or thereabouts. These chips might go in early, as I’m very hungry, despite having spent a day at theMasterChef studios being presented with the finest plates of culinary prowess: a haunch of venison with celeriac three ways with a Malbec jus, and a kumquat soufflé with freshly churned Madagascan vanilla ice cream. It was finickity, fancy food delivered by very stressed chefs, their tension palpable as they entered the room. The eating session was long, with there being four contestants and eight courses, but due to the realities of TV, I only ate very small amounts of very rich things. Now I’m home, and my stomach is rumbling. What I need is some proper dinner, or my ‘tea’ as I’d have called it when I first began making this recipe.
I need comfort food.
The oven chips are nearly ready now. Their plastic bag is returned to the top drawer of the freezer cabinet, alongside Birds Eye potato waffles, Asda cheese and garlic ciabatta slices, Magnums and a Warburtons Toastie white loaf, in what my other half Charlie and I call ‘the Drawer of Deliciousness’. This is the drawer full of things a frazzled individual can rely on when life feels difficult: bready things, potatoey things, buttery things; sweet things to soothe and cheesy things that melt in strings and cling to your chin as you watchPolice Interceptors on Channel 5. Sometimes a human being just wants comfort food they can make on autopilot. They want tastes and textures that will fill their stomach and make it tell their brain that everything is going to be all right. ‘Just eat your tea,’ it says, ‘and go to bed. Tomorrow is another day.’
I throw the crispy brown chips in a bowl – they’re far too hot to pick up, but I do it anyway, wincing – then hurl Saxa salt at them straight from the canister, followed by some Sarson’s malt vinegar. This is no time for the finest pink sea salt fetched from the Himalayas or balsamic from Modena. No. I take a jar of Bisto gravy granules and put two heaped teaspoons into a mug and stir in boiling water. Instant gravy! I cover the chips in the slippery stuff. Then, finally, I finish mypièce de résistance with blobs of green mint sauce. Just opening that jar sends me back to Sunday dinners as a child.
I take dinner on a tray to the living room, where I eat it alone, wearing mismatched pyjama top and bottoms, surrounded by the remnants of today’s TV glamour: stripped-off false eyelashes, piles of geisha hair grips, clip-in hair extensions draped over chair arms that look like small feral creatures, high heels, a push-up bra and piles of cotton wool I’ve used to take off a three-tone eyeshadow.
All these things are fake, just smoke and mirrors for telly. But what is on my plate is sheer reality. This bowl of brown and green is a dollop of nostalgia. It’s Mam’s Sunday dinners, it’s a bell ringing at school in the eighties, and a laugh with friends about last night’sBlackadder. It has echoes of walking home from the Twisted Wheel nightclub in Carlisle with the lasses in the eighties, too, where a kiosk in the wall near the Citadel would serve pie, chips and peas with ladles of gravy for £1.50. We’d clutch our polystyrene trays, tipsy, half-naked in spandex, and walk the two miles home in Dolcis kitten heels and body glitter. We felt invincible.
Even though those days are long gone, I’ll never stop being fascinated by the things we eat when nobody’s watching. They say so much about us. Yes, you could say that we’re just mindlessly popping things in a minimart plastic bag, taking them home to be warmed up and eaten. But I’ve realised it isn’t mindless, actually: so often we are recreating childhood or teenage family life, our uni days or t
