Chip Shop Curry Sauce

I love chip shop curry sauce

Sweet, but not really. Spicy, but not really. Curry, but - again - not really. What gloop could be more glorious, what condiment more contenting, what sauce more seriously to be savoured, than good, old fashioned, traditional British, yeoman of the guard, world without end amen, HM chip shop curry sauce?

We are diverse, on these rainy little islands, in our dialects and our pastimes, in our tastes and peccadilloes, and diverse indeed in the way we go about eating deep fried fish and potatoes. I will not accept the folly - I do not go so far as to say “heresy” but… - that there is such thing as “fish and chips” in the south of England. At least not where I am, a hundred miles from salt water. If I want them, it is one or other of South or North Shields, the former preferably. And the diversity I mean is not just spatial but temporal. My dad insists that chips cannot really be chips if not made in something called “beef dripping”, a flaky white substance I have only seen in hipster shops on Newington Green; and yet I can in my imagination see Pam - the heavily seasoned old girl who’s worked at Gills on Stanhope Road since I was a tot - heaving the stuff by the tub-full into the incandescence of the deep fat fryer, losing a fag-end here and there, while the menfolk dress and douse the seafood out back. Now we must do with unromantic vegetable polysaturates.

But there is nothing wrong with a little innovation (but only a little, especially when it comes to serious matters such as this, and not for its own sake). The innovation I have in mind in this regard is the wonder that is chip shop curry sauce. Like so much we ought to treasure, it came to us in the middle of the twentieth century from a tropical, former imperial possession. What is it really made of? Who can say. Some sort of spice, certainly, (cumin and pepper maybe) but I suspect rather a lot of butter too. What the bits in it are, I should prefer to leave to the speculation of others.

Of course, the sauce has its roots in that timid, toe-dipping Brits performed in the shallows of Indian (or more likely Pakistani or Bangladeshi) food culture in the 60s and 70s. Plainly, and in the greatest favour done to the English tongue since Shakespeare thought he’d better earn a living, those food cultures have in the decades since come to know stratospheric popularity here, leaving far behind its early toehold in sweet and sour chip enhancement. But all things at the right time.

Yes, I like mushy peas. Of course I do. No one is attacking mushy peas. But amid the crunch of the batter, the giving white flesh and the hot, clarifying grease and vinegar fumes, the unctuousness of that mild tongue tickler seems to me an absolute essential. To misquote Olivia Colman’s¹ character in the film Hot Fuzz, “nothing better than a bit of [beige] on [beige]”.

1. She, presumably, a scion of the great Colman dynasty of South Shields fish and chip vendors.