Jesse Mulligan: An ode to fish and chips

Jesse Mulligan in praise of chowing down on deep-fried, salty, deliciously unhealthy fish and chips.

You may expect an out-of-touch restaurant critic like me to screw up his nose at fish and chips, but I'm a believer. This simple, delicious combination performs a magic trick in which you forget everything you know about what you shouldn't be eating and instead cram your face with high-starch carbohydrates deep fried in saturated fat to produce acrylamide, a suspected carcinogen. I don't care right now, do you? Go get the tomato sauce.

I'm not even put off by the lack of sophistication. Batter and hot oil may not sound like much of a recipe but the fact is, it cannot be improved. Last year, I dined at one of the fanciest restaurants in New Zealand, where the number of courses was in double digits and the food alone cost almost $200 a head. And what was the centrepiece of the meal? Battered fish cooked in oil. I'm sure the chef there thinks his recipe is special but honestly the only difference between the expensive version and the snapper I buy at Newton Chippery for $5 a fillet is that the restaurant kitchen cut their one into bite-size pieces and served it in a bowl.

Good fish and chips are straightforward but you can still stuff it up.

Salt is important and the only proper time to salt chips is when they're straight out of the vat, quivering with temperature shock, desperate to welcome and absorb any seasoning you shake over them.

Certain woke fish and chip shops are holding back on the sodium these days, knowing that salt is a four-letter word for many health professionals, but the salt you add to real food like chips will never cause the same problems as the invisible stuff hidden in ready meals and sauces.

Do you want to be known as the chips-and-mayo guy? And don't get me started on sriracha.

Tell your server to shake the salt like it's a Polaroid picture.

The batter should cling to the fish for dear life, but too often you take one bite and the whole thing falls apart, leaving you with hot white gurnard meat in one hand and a scabbard of crispy-fried flour in the other (don't try to get round this problem by ordering your fish crumbed — remember the Bible says that the crumbs of the land and the finned creatures of the sea must never be enjoined in the mouths of men). Once you meet a chip shop that can judge the chemistry and physics of a fried fish exactly right, stop playing the field and tell them you want to go exclusive.

Ketchup is compulsory, but consider a saucer of malt vinegar for nostalgia value. Perfect food is about balance and a salty chip works well with either the sweet and slightly acidic tomato sauce or the deep tang of dark vinegar. I've had fries with a kind of apple sauce in the US and the Belgians will bore you with the virtues of mayonnaise but, honestly, do you want to be known among your friends as the chips-and-mayo guy? And don't get me started on sriracha.

For some time, chips were wrapped in yesterday's newspaper but this trend isn't so common now.

These days they're wrapped in a kind of plain off-white paper that must cost almost nothing to the chip shops but I bet if you tried to get some from a Ponsonby art supplies shop they'd charge you $13.50 a sheet.

When you've picked up your payload and you're on your way home you may find a member of your squad peer-pressuring you to rip open one end and take turns reaching in to grab a handful. There are two major problems with this approach. Tell your friend (let me guess, they're also way too into Stranger Things) that although this approach might have been popular in the 80s, the vent created by such a manoeuvre is simply not large enough to cool down the chips sufficiently to handle, and that you are most likely to find yourself resorting to traditional methods within a few minutes — the downside being all your formerly perfect chips have now been irretrievably squashed by the ouchy prodding of your thick dirty fingertips.

Instead, unwrap your meal carefully and place the whole package on a mostly flat surface: a dinner table is fine, a deck is better and if you can find a patch of that springy beach grass, you've hit the Kiwi summer home run. Hopefully you've ordered enough — who can say with the "scoop" system, which arrived without controversy in the 90s but has caused much confusion due to widespread uncertainty about the volume of chips transported by said scoop. But hey, if you under-ordered, console yourself with the fact that no amount of chips would have ever been enough; that even if you'd ordered 10 scoops you would still be hungrily fighting your friends and family over the final crunchy scraps, your belly completely full but your brain programmed to keep requesting mouthfuls until the last tiny crumb has mercifully disappeared.