Chip buttie

My mother introduced me to these in Coventry. I wonder how she discovered them. Our local chippie was at the bottom of Earlsdon Avenue. I do not remember whether we acquired the butties in the shop itself or whether they were made when we got home. At all events, it proved to be a wonderful and curious mixture of fats and carbohydrates: butter, salt, vinegar, bread and chip.

Many years later, I overheard two of my teachers at prep school talking in surprised disgust at the conduct of a visiting teacher from another school - there for a football match presumably - about how he put his chips between bread and butter. I was longing to contribute to this adult conversation by explaining that this was a chip buttie but was frostily excluded.

The signs

As we left, we mused on two things. First, that one is allowed to have one appallingly bad meal on holiday. Secondly, that all the warning signs had been there when we wandered in.

A woman dressed in pink lured us in. There were some other holidaymakers attacking a plate of bacon and eggs on a table near to us. The menu had lurid photographs of all the food. The waiter brought me a coke - not diet coke as I had requested - but denied that I had done so, then said he would bring me a diet coke "anyway": what a concession. When I asked the woman in pink for the wifi password, she said, "The waiter hasn't given it to you? He must still be asleep."

Perhaps not. To do him credit, he was good enough to tell us that there were chips with the meatballs so we didn't need to order an extra portion. He looked doubtful when we asked for potato salad but came back to say it was available.

Then it all arrived. From the moment he put down the meatballs, we knew it had all been a terrible mistake. They had a dry crust, resembling hollow husks. The chips, too, were dry. So was the Greek salad. It looked as though its components had been around all morning, waiting for an unsuspecting customer. The taramasalata was as pink as our hostess's dress, and woody-tasting. Katie had a mushroom which was frozen in the middle. Mine was merely rubbery. The Tatziki was just yoghurt with cucumber, tasting of nothing. Katie said it all looked as though it had emerged from the freezer twenty minutes before and added that the chips tasted of the stale oil in which they had been cooked. We toyed with our platefuls, reluctant to cause a diplomatic incident or to waste what had been brought. But in the end, Katie used diplomatic 'flu as the excuse and went and paid the bill, saying I felt unwell. It was not altogether a lie.

The City Arms

The Round Wimpy in the Coventry Precincts was my favourite cafe. The City Arms in Earlsdon was my favourite restaurant. It was where our grandparents would take us as a special treat. About five minutes' drive from their house, the City Arms was at the bottom of Earlsdon High Street, next to a roundabout: a hub dividing affluent, leafy, unchanged Coventry from its bomb-shattered heart. Not far away, as a child, my father had ridden his bike into "Devil's Dungeons", an exciting dip in the ground, surrounded by woodland.

I think the City Arms was a Berni Inn or its equivalent. Dark upstairs, red plush everywhere, it epitomised the nineteen seventies. But we spurned the cloying sauces and over-rich gateaux which went with the territory. The meal would not vary as far as I was concerned: rump steak with chips on patterned oval plates followed by vanilla ice cream in small silver bowls with a thick raspberry sauce and a scattering of nuts on top.

My younger brother once decided that he wanted just the sauce and nuts in a bowl with no ice cream. When this rather sparse-looking dish arrived, Grandfather was a little anxious about whether this was really what William had wanted. My brother appeared to be entirely content.

The waitresses were only too happy to serve the grandparents taking out their small grandchildren. "Aren't they kind bringing us all this lovely food?" my grandmother insists that I piped up on one occasion, a story she dined out on for years afterwards.

It was at the City Arms that I learned the concept of having a steak cooked to a diner's specification. Of all people, it was Granny who told the waitress that I would have it cooked rare. Of all people because neither Granny nor Grandfather could bear their meat cooked rare. But Granny knew that if I was my parents' son, the prospect of my wanting beef cooked into grey dryness was remote. Rare. I wasn't sure what rare meant. I wanted it red. And rare, I discovered, meant red. But with pleasing grill lines seared on top.

When I sat the entrance exam for King Henry VIII grammar school, my friend Rachel told me that if she passed the exam, she would be rewarded with a meal out and a box of chocolates. I repeated this to my mother, quite possibly in the hope that I would be offered a similar bribe. Instead, my mother was horrified at the prospect. "Imagine how she'd feel if she failed!" There was only one logical consequence. Merely for sitting the exam, I was taken out for lunch afterwards at the City Arms. And, as it turned out later, I managed to secure the lowest mark in Maths of all the candidates and thus failed to get into the school. But this had not stopped me from securing my rump steak, ice cream and box of Black Magic, with the best chocolate of all inside: the liquid cherry.

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.

The first French restaurant

When my parents first started taking us to the south of France in the mid nineteen seventies, they were doing something relatively unusual for the times. There was not a lot of money and - surprisingly, perhaps, for the daughter of an Italian - my mother would pack food from home which we took with us: packets of Shredded Wheat; those round flat tins containing Fray Bentos steak pies; and tins of meatballs. It might have had something to do with exchange controls.

Be that as it may, two tins of the meatballs got to the south of France. One was pronounced so disgusting that the other was shipped all the way back to London and given to harvest festival collectors who came to the door.

One year, we had arrived in northern France; the tent was up; and we were all hungry. I have a feeling that my aunt Christine was with us. For whatever reason, the idea of opening one of the tins of food was rejected and we headed out, destination unknown. It was to be my first meal in a French restaurant, indeed my first meal in any restaurant other than a Berni Inn.

I do not recall there being much choice about where we would eat. The restaurant was on a  square in a nondescript northern French town. It was dark. But the light coming from the restaurant was cheerful and the place bustled. There were probably white paper tablecloths. It was that kind of place.

In those days, my brother and I shared one adult portion between us. I can remember the menu very clearly. Cornets of ham, filled with "crudités"; stuffed tomatoes; Steak-frites. And, having said I can remember the menu, I have no recollection of what there was for pudding. If the place was anything like the dozens of other, similar restaurants we were to encounter over the years, there would have been a choice: Crème Caramel, Mousse au Chocolat, Tarte aux Pommes, Glaces, Flan. Or was "Flan" simply another term for "Crème Caramel"?

I suspect that if we had walked into such a restaurant thirty years later and been offered the same things, we would have spent the rest of the holiday reliving the appalling meal we had endured. Instead, on that August night in the nineteen seventies, we were all enchanted with cornets of plastic jambon de Paris with tinned Russian salad in thin mayonnaise; with tomatoes that were stuffed with some kind of mince; with steak that, according to my mother, was "probably horse".

So enchanted were we that a few years later, at my particular request, we returned. It was a mistake. None of us knew for certain even the name of the town, although I had a vague recollection that it was called Albans or something similar. My father only remembered roughly where we would have stopped on that first night. We spent some time fruitlessly searching for it as the night grew darker and ended up back at the campsite, hungrier than when we had left, forced once again into self-catering. A sarcastic remark I made ("Well that's great!") was misconstrued as being a criticism of others and it was not a happy evening.

The following day, we renewed our search and very quickly came upon the square in the town, to find the restaurant, and it was open. It was not usual for us to eat out at lunchtime but it would clearly have been rude not to have done so on this occasion. And my father suggested we did just that. It was perhaps an illustration of how one should never try to recreate the perfect meal. Unlike its forerunner, the menu has passed into oblivion, although my father documented the "foul mashed potato" in the holiday log. His conclusion about the meal was that it was "much less impressive (and more expensive!) than last time". Or had we simply grown more sophisticated in the intervening years?

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?

Steak

Is steak the quintessential classless dish? There are examples dotted throughout film, television and literature of all manner of people making it their (usually evening) meal of choice, and being quite protective about it.

Such as Enid Blyton's Fatty Trotteville, going into the kitchen, having declined to divide his steak among his friends, to make love to the cook and fishing half-cooked onions out of the frying pan.

Shirley Valentine's husband, livid when his Thursday steak is fed to the neighbour's far from vegetarian bloodhound and he is presented with egg and chips instead: "What's this?"

The wailed "Where's my steak and onions?" from a film whose name I can't even remember.

The splendid diet of beefsteak prescribed for the hypochondriac (the one who reads a medical encyclopaedia and discovers he has everything bar Housemaid's Knee) in "Three Men and a Boat".

There is even the glorious moment in my favourite television programme as a child, Rentaghost, when one of the ghosts is ordered to produce a steak to put on somebody's injured eye. Instantly magicked up is a very tempting looking plate of fried steak, chips and peas. Rejected by the wife of the injured party ("Not that kind of steak - a RAW steak you idiot!"), the plate is grabbed by a greedy Christopher Biggins: "I'll have that. Delicious!"

Also from childhood, I remember a particular strip in the recently defunct "Dandy" comic, which was one of the regular adventures of "Bertie Buncle and his Chemical Uncle". In this particular story, the uncle produces in a test tube a synthetic smell of steak and onions, which Bertie "borrows" and takes to school. He surreptitiously undoes the stopper in the classroom where one of those teachers who continued to exist in comics until at least the eighties sits in front of a blackboard, wearing mortar board and gown and brandishing a cane. The teacher is unable to discover the source of the delicious aroma wafting visibly across the classroom and licks his lips: "That smell is beginning to make me hungry. Slurp!" In the next picture, we see the steak-and-onions smell still drifting past the now suffering teacher's nose: "Oh dear, I can't stop thinking about food". Next we see him yelling manically as he leaps from his desk: "Class dismissed! We're all starving!" And finally, they are all wrestling with one another in the tuck shop, food flying everywhere, the teacher at the front of the queue, gown flapping. And all because of steak.

My Favourite Café

When we lived in Coventry for the first seven years of my life, we used to shop in the Precincts. One of those terms like "ring road" and "dual carriageway" with which I was very familiar due to regularly hearing it. But I did not know exactly what it meant.

The precincts spread far and wide and, doing a morning's shopping, we would range over them, going into shops here and there, retracing our steps on occasion. Sometimes the sight I longed for came into view, from a number of different angles. But it would be a very rare occasion that we would venture in.

My favourite cafe was round. It was on the highest level of the precincts and to reach it you had to walk up a ramp. Walking up it, the lower levels of the precincts far below, was almost like crossing a moat to reach a castle. Inside, it was a Wimpy bar. These were the days before McDonald's persuaded them to get their act together and so there was, for example, a ketchup-encrusted plastic bottle on each table in the shape of a tomato.

I would tend to have the same thing: a Shanty fish: an orange breadcrumbed square, with chips. I looked at but never tried the strange round frankfurter thing with bits sticking out. Puddings, too, were out of the question, beg as I might, but I would look longingly at the photographs on the menus with wordy descriptions of what was on offer. The idea of a Banana Longboat thrilled me, with its piles of "cocktail fruit" and scoops of vanilla ice cream. Then there was the "Brown Derby" which I used to pronounce as though it rhymed with herby. A sort of doughnut, I seem to recall, smothered in chocolate sauce. And the Knickerbocker Glory: basically ice cream and more cocktail fruit in a tall glass.

More often than to my "Favourite cafe", if we ate out at all during these shopping expeditions, it would be to Elizabeth the Chef we would go: a steamy, bustling coffee-scented place that was altogether more sophisticated than the frankly greasy and tatty Wimpy Bar. But it didn't have the tomato-shaped bottles on the table, no Shanty fish, and no Banana Longboats.