We had fish and chips in a Temple Bar restaurant for lunch. They took forty-five minutes to serve them. The portion of fish was more batter than fish, the chips were more like the starch sticks they call ‘fries’ than like proper chips.
Searching for condiments, the vinegar and tomato sauce were in plastic sachets. The ketchup was not Heinz, and even worse for fish and chips, the vinegar was not Sarson’s.
Sarson’s has been a friend for as long as I can remember.
Sarson’s went over soggy chips wrapped in sheets from unsold newspapers. Like Liam Clancy once said of eating pig trotters wrapped up in copies of last week’s Munster Express, ‘there was eating and there was reading’. An over generous shake of the bottle and the paper became soggy and left newsprint on your hands.
Sarson’s went over bags of cockles bought from a stall at the harbour in Lyme Regis. The shellfish already had their own saltiness; a shake of the maroon-labelled bottle gave them a piquant flavour. If English seaside towns had a taste that captured a sense of the place, it was cockles and vinegar.
In undergraduate days, Sarson’s went over the huge portions of fish and chips my uncle would bring into his home in Kew in west London at teatime each Friday. ‘Now, who’s for what?’ he would say, pretending that he had forgotten the order on his way home.
During ordination training in Dublin, Sarson’s went over fish and chips at the Wimpy in Rathmines on the occasional visits there. College food on Fridays was so bad that the extravagance of going to the Wimpy could be justified. The fish and chips came with tea served in battered aluminium pots and with slices of white bread thinly spread with butter. The food left you feeling full for hours afterwards
Sarson’s has always been there. Flick the lid and pour the vinegar over a bag of chips chips, and it is instantly summertime. There is a memory of sitting in a car with a bag of hot chips perched on a knee. There is the sound of seagulls and the noise diesel engines of boats. There is the laughter of a Friday evening when a whole weekend stretched ahead and Monday was an eternity away. There is a sense of all being well with the world.
Perhaps that is the real attraction of the Sarson’s: a whiff and, for just one moment, the realities outside fade away
My first wife, who was a food scientist, once told me that Sarsons was the only company who made malt vinegar in the UK, so if you bought British malt vinegar then it was Sarsons, no matter what it said on the bottle. I don’t know if this is true or not, but I am not too particular about what name it has on the bottle, as long as it is malt vinegar.
What is worse is the ‘non brewed condiment’ which seems to be popular in this part of Devon. Some even seem to look upon it with approval, as if it were somewhat superior. I don’t think so! Give me proper malt vinegar!
I had never thought about the malt element, it is the barley that gives it that distinctive taste.
I had not heard of ‘non-brewed condiment.’ I see Trading Standards have forbidden its labelling or presentation as vinegar. I wonder how many places decant it into vinegar bottles.
I don’t eat chips often any more… but when I do I like a sprinkling of vinegar (yes, Sarsons) because it makes the generous sprinkling of salt stick better.
That sounds like fish and chips eaten by a connoisseur