The social media side of Substack, like social media in general, provides us with the opportunity for people of different cultures to learn about each other, and sometimes to wonder how it’s possible that they live the way they do.
Recently, for example, a Californian textile artist who goes by the name of illustr8d wrote of her astonishment at discovering, when she was a teenager, that British people put vinegar on French fries. I, in turn, was astonished that it had taken her so long to find out.
Being a man of the world, or so I like to think, I knew that what she calls French fries are what I would call chips, as opposed to what she would call chips, which are what I would call crisps. The terminology, therefore, wasn’t a problem.
The problem was that I hadn’t realised there was a part of the English-speaking world where people not only didn’t put vinegar on their chips but were unaware that anyone else did. I could hardly believe it.
I was brought up in the west of Scotland, and for most of my childhood it was unusual for me to get through a whole week, and almost unheard of to get through a whole month, without eating at least one helping of vinegar-covered chips. They were as much a part of life as rain and disappointing football results.
In the same way that it was once claimed you are never more than six feet from a rat, I was always within walking distance of a chip-selling emporium, or ‘chippy’ as we called them, whenever I was in a built-up area. If any of them had the misfortune to run out of vinegar, I suspect they would have gone out of business within ten minutes.
Chippys (or is it chippies?) might in some cases attempt to appear more refined by calling themselves fish and chicken bars, but this did nothing to disguise the fact that they always sold chips. That wasn’t compulsory, of course. You could buy a piece of deep-fried, battered fish without chips if you wanted to, though I don’t think I ever saw this happen.
It was, to say the least, far more common to buy a fish supper, the word ‘supper’ in this context meaning neither more nor less than ‘with chips’. Now you know that, the terms ‘chicken supper’, ‘sausage supper’ and ‘haggis supper’ (yes, really) will not require explanation.
“Do you want salt and vinegar with that?” the person at the counter would invariably ask before wrapping up the meal, overflowing with calories and saturated fats and always smelling better in the chippy than it tasted when you got home, but delicious all the same.
Of course I wanted salt and vinegar with that. Nearly everyone did. Without it, the meal would be bland and uninteresting, and could not be saved even by an accompanying glass of Garvie’s limeade which, I will insist to my dying day, is absolutely the best thing to drink between mouthfuls of salt-and-vinegared fish supper. (See also: bacon rolls and sweet coffee).
If you replied that you didn’t want salt and vinegar, you would be assumed to be suffering from some form of illness, and perhaps be required to provide evidence of a medical assessment. Protests about simply not liking vinegar would be dismissed out of hand. Everyone liked vinegar on their chips.
Everyone in the west of Scotland when I was growing up, anyway. A few dozen miles to the east there was a strange place called Edinburgh, where the buses were a different colour and the chip condiment policy, as I found out one terrible day, was dramatically at odds with the one I knew.
“Do you want salt and sauce with that?” I was in my early twenties, and should have been able to adapt more quickly to an unfamiliar situation than would have been possible ten years before, but I couldn’t think of anything to say because my mind was fully occupied with this thought: what is the word ‘sauce’ doing in that sentence?
I rationalised the situation by deciding that ‘sauce’ was Edinburgh slang for ‘vinegar’, in the same way that ‘gas’ was once used in Glasgow to describe any publicly available energy source, including electricity. Obviously the person at the counter didn’t mean actual sauce. That wouldn’t make any sense at all.
“Yes, please,” I replied eventually, confident that my fish supper would promptly be festooned with salt and vinegar, as God intended. Two seconds later, my world fell apart when I saw the supper in question being ruined by several large dollops of HP sauce. I have always liked HP sauce, but putting it on fish and chips about as acceptable as putting parmesan on a crème caramel.
I left the chippy and trudged sorrowfully back to my car with the awful concoction. I ate it anyway, because I was hungry and this was all the food I had, but I was psychologically broken by the experience, and have remained so ever since.
Top image copyright Gvjekoslav.
Public domain.
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