Postcard from Norfolk - Fish and Chips

One of the holiday party has announced that they are on a mission to have fish and chips every day of the holiday.

Given the enthusiastic rapture that I was in yesterday as a result of the seafood platter at the White Horse (a dish that deserves capitalisation and so will henceforth be known as the Seafood Platter), and the secret ambition I am nurturing not just to have the Seafood Platter every day but, if at all possible, every meal, I am in no position to criticise what I now consider a sound and admirable moral choice.

Because if you are going to choose to have fish and chips every day, this is the place to do it.

Fish and chips on the Norfolk coast is a single meal option with a multitude of options and varieties.  Obviously, you have your sauces, but you also have side dishes.  Well, one side dish, mushy peas.  Simply remembering there are more fish than cod in the sea that taste astonishing when battered for your pleasure makes the possibilities if not limitless, then certainly enough to fill a week.

Me?  I go for cod and chips from French’s, the best fish and chipper in the world.

This, it appears, is hardly a secret.  The queue was, literally, out the door when I arrived.  However, thanks to the experienced team working the friars, it was a moving queue and, because we were all only ten minutes away from golden battered goodness, it was a good humoured one.

It’s not just the tourists who turn up to take away here, it’s the locals too.  What I love about the take away service is that fish and chips is, more than any other food, ideally suited to being a take-away product.

Most importantly, French’s serve their fish and chips in a cardboard container.  No polystyrene here, just good, honest paper-based flatware.  What’s more, they warp them in sheets of paper to keep them warm.  What’s even more, they bag them in paper bags or, more precisely given the amount of fish and chips I was picking up, sacks.  French’s must have a paper bill just below that of a mass-market tabloid.

The benefit of all this is twofold.  Firstly, it keeps everything toasty for the journey back to the caravan, without everything going soggy in the way that using unnatural, godless packaging makes it.  Secondly, it allows the aroma to drift gently up and around the interior of the car.  This is especially wonderful of a wet winter night when, with a warm bag of fish and chips in your lap, the interior of the car slowly becomes a vinegary fug, a different variety of the atmosphere that is normally only found under duvets; warm, welcoming, comforting.

Finally, of course, one has the sauce sachets and condiment packets.  One is treated like a grown up and trusted to sauce and season one’s own whips.  The question is, one sachet of red sauce, or ten?  The supposed answer may be found in the pages of the better guides to etiquette, the actual answer is; as many as one thinks is appropriate.  We don’t judge.