Onion vinegar

The best chip shops offer a choice of vinegar. There is the common brown sort which used to be called malt vinegar but now comes in bottles labelled "non-brewed condiment". And the clearer, slightly green sort which I was told by the man in the chip shop in Canterbury was onion vinegar: the stuff in which pickled onions are stored.

As well as looking different, it has a more interesting flavour, and soaks far better into the chips and batter than the malt variety. Of course, the purist would say that it is wrong to call these vinegars at all because vinegar means sour wine. Hence our being lumbered with "non-brewed condiment". And I have tried shaking wine vinegar on to fish and chips. It just doesn't work. Just as a green salad with oil and malt vinegar is an abomination.

Batter

I should look up where this word comes from in the context of cooking. It sounds violent enough: cod that's been beaten up, anyone? It has the same lip-smacking, tongue-tooth clashing sounds as one of its ingredients, butter.

There is something immensely satisfactory about the way that it turns from liquid into crisp solidity, hardening into the shape of the thing it surrounds; somehow it enhances a dish by simplifying it. Think of a flaky tempura prawn; the best I ever found were in a Japanese shop, now sadly closed, in Chinatown. Or fish from a fish and chip shop. And there are those little bits of loose batter that they'll give you for free if you ask. Perhaps the ultimate in simplicity is the white ladleful turned into a golden pancake. Pancakes which should never be merely crisp, but crisp and melting.

Bur it can be dull, something to chew through, such as bad Yorkshire Pudding. Then, of course, it can be a disguise for something horrid: spam fritter, for instance. Or it can make something utterly unhealthy even unhealthier: deep-fried Mars Bars (do they really exist?) and even deep fried pizza: yuk is not a word I often use as I try to recognise that it is reasonable for others to love food that I detest, but: yuk.

Scallops

This has nothing to do with the seafood but it does concern something I have only ever found in a fish and chip shop. I should be slightly more accurate: in fact, I have come across the scallop in a handful of fish and chip shops, but only in Coventry, where I was born, and York, where I went to university.

More chip than fish, the scallops I have in mind are discs of potato, dipped in batter and then deep-fried. Their shape, size and the addition of batter gives them, in my view, an utterly different taste and texture to chips. I would not wish to suggest that you replace "a portion of chips" with a scallop, but instead, have it as an extra item, like a gherkin or a pickled onion. And if that sounds excessive, what are you doing in a chip shop anyway?