A little bit on the side, or on the top

I adore chips.  I adore their many varieties.  There’s your basic chip, essentially a (thick) slice of potato, deeply fried.  Then you have your french fry, and finally, for the aesthetes in the crowd, the crinkle cut.  The shape of the chip is just the start of the journey, as it’s the preparation that makes such a difference.  Rule of thumb, the more of an animal you use in the preparation of a vegetable related product, the better the outcome.  That’s why double-dipped larded fat-and-grease loaded chips, cooked in cow, are the best sort of chips.
Of course, some see chips simply as the enabler of the main event – salt and vinegar.  Salt is of course essential for human life, as without it food would be bland, leading to the sort of ‘what’s the point’ ennui that may not be destructive on its own but, when combined with floppy hair, poetry and the ready availability of laudanum, can prove disastrous.
The chief role of vinegar as a dressing is to be sluiced over hot chips with the resulting cloud of scent wafted into a confined area, making everyone in that area want chips.  Now!
As a result of being deeply fried, chips formally cease to become vegetables and are granted honorary ‘actual food’ status.  But we should acknowledge that vegetables do have a part to play in the world of dressings and sauces.  That role is to assist delivery of thousand-island and other brightly coloured, tangy, vegetable-taste-disguising dressings.  Naturally, certain protocols have to be observed.  Stood at a salad bar with a spoon, wolfing down ranch?  Freak.  Stood at that same salad bar using a stick of celery to scoop and swallow?  Better.  But do remember to bite the end of the celery off rather than sucking the sauce off of the end and going back for more.  Such double-dipping can result in lifetime bans, even from a Harvester.  At a Berni Inn, it simply results in a good shoeing ‘out the back’.
Cooks occasionally get bent out of shape when a customer salts their food before even tasting it.  They should of course realise that this is infinitely preferable to the strangled cry of ‘agggh, this is shit!’  >sprinkle sprinkle< ‘Mummmm, much better.’ from the dining room.  If salt wasn’t so important we wouldn’t have fought wars over the stuff, and Waitrose wouldn’t sell seven different varieties of what is, at the end of the day, tasty aggregate. 

There’s nothing wrong with prepping your plate in anticipation of your meal.  Any sort of meat dish requires mustard, of course.  Coleman’s English Mustard to smear on the edge of your plate, French wholegrain to remain securely in its jar until the end of days.  Lamb is a game-changer, as you are now able to add mint-sauce to your greens to taste.  That taste should be ‘largely mint sauce’.
Pepper is an oddity.  The place for pepper is usually in the preparation rather than the consumption.  Back in the seventies pepper came in the form of a dust so fine it was one step away from being best applied by aerosol.  A spirited session with a pepper shaker could produce a cloud of the stuff that, if inhaled, led to the sort of reaction unseen since the Regency period when a new consignment of ‘Stonkers’s Very Strong Gentlemen’s Snuff’ landed on the docks.  Now pepper comes in chunks as folk wrestle with their grinders before giving up and reaching for the salt.  The only place where pepper is successfully served is in certain restaurants, where a man with, usually, tight trousers will sidle up to you and, holding an object which if it were coloured pink would see him arrested for indecency, will discretely grind to your satisfaction.
In an age when food manufacturers seek to pre-load edible excitement by helpfully including 125% of our daily salt, fat and sugar requirement in one portion of ready meal, we still love a dollop of sauce.  That’s why I live in hope of one day being offered the sauce menu when taking my seat in a restaurant and, when deciding on ‘the Daddies’, having the waiter murmur ‘excellent choice sir’.