Dean Whitbread 2020
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The vogue for applying the sciences of high culture – in this case, the kind of detailed olfactory appreciation and analysis usually reserved for perfume, cologne, or that most expensive of scents, wine – to cheaper forms of life is continuing. The BBC reports on the University of Leeds study of the complex aroma of chips.
Using gas chromatography mass spectrometry, they have arrived at the understanding that the alluring smell of a cooking chip is formed of a complexity of aromatic elements, including butterscotch, cocoa, onion, flowers, cheese and ironing boards.
Orwell would have approved that these careful measurements were being applied to the friend of paupers and drunks everywhere, the common fried potato. This study takes us into realms of understanding which the class system – still rigidly applied almost everywhere – has previously denied us. Opera house grants will be awarded to chip shops whose sterling work as larder of the community will finally be recognised; and future studies, enabled by this ennobling of the chip as working class food icon, will go further.
The smell of chips is not just a groping simile, it is metaphor. It means liberty, it means fraternity, and it means victory. Staying out past tea-time with the few pence in your pocket keeping hunger’s wolf at bay; treating your schoolfriends to a portion with gherkin or pickled onion, the first meal you ever buy for someone else, because you can. It means freedom from the kitchen, maternal discipline, the rule of domestic law. It means a quick visit on the way to the pub after the game to bless cameraderie with salt and vinegar.
It means the creation of cultural kin, endless possibilities with people from elsewhere – curry sauce (Manchester) or mayonnaise (Belgium), or cod roe, the poor man’s caviar. It means arriving home after a late one and a long night bus journey without dying of cold. It means sharing your tattered bag with a lover at the bus stop, greedily filling each other with carbohydrates which the mating ritual has demanded.
The humble chip, not paltry, weedy, thin, over-salted, Americanised fries, is a more perfect symbol of our culture, our endurance and our sense of place than the flag, football, the Queen, Tower Bridge, or Antiques Roadshow will ever be.
