Scraps

Now, I imagine that many of you have never had scraps, as in chips and scraps. I bet that even fewer of you have had scraps and pea gravy. They were the stuff of life in a small Northern English town of the 1960s when we used to frequent the chip shop once or twice a week.

 

Now that I am inhabiting the nancy South of England, scraps are hard to come by. I am using a Chinese chip shop in Bicester at the moment and not only are their chips good by Southern standards but they serve huge portions: one bag of chips being enough for two or three people. Seriously, try it! Anyway, every time I go in I mention the scraps and am told they don't keep them. I then wax lyrical about them and am working on the outcome that one day they will relent and serve me with some scraps.

 

Someone in that chip shop told me last week that when they got scraps at their local chippy, they had to pay for them. Canyou believe that? Not me! As demonstrated by the Chinese, they are a waste product and the way they got into a bag of chips when I were a lad is that they were dumped into a container at the end of the frying range to be emptied into the bin once full. However, if anyone asked for scraps with their fish and chips, they got them ... FREE OF CHARGE. If no one asked for them, they were wuzzed.

 

I let it be known last week that scraps with pea gravy was a delicacy that impudent people like us used to ask for from time to time: again, completely free of charge even though they were served in a bag as in bag of chips! How about that: take a small ladle of liquid from the pan of mushy peas and add them to a bag of scraps? Marvellous! Beats chicken tikka marsala any day. I love curries, too, of course; but the old tastes can't be beaten.

 

DW