Egg and chips for tea

"Two perfectly fried eggs and a huge side of chips cooked by someone who loves you. It’s the ultimate comfort food: crispy fried potatoes with floury centres dipped into the yolk of a sunny egg." Lilly Higgins/The Irish Times

We never have egg and chips for tea nowadays. Well we are very definitely middle to upper class. Middle I think. I think you have to be born into money and prestige to be upper class. No matter how much money you might make in your life you are not upper class. Is David Beckham upper class for example? Was John Lennon? I mention John Lennon because apparently egg and chips were his favourite.

When I was young however, and more working than middle class we did eat egg and chips regularly for tea. Tea being dinner but eaten much earlier than dinner. Five o'clock apparently is the standard.

"Jim and his dad were working class. And members of the working class at that time thought it completely natural to eat five o'clock in the afternoon. But even more, as members of the working class they took it for granted that everyone else ate at that time and would happily regard egg and chips and tea as the perfect meal for the occasion." Laurie Taylor

Ours looked very much like the plate above which is Dad's egg and chips from the Lavender and Lovage website. The chips were home-made in a chip pan - twice-cooked, but not Heston's three. In dripping I think or some type of vegetable oil. The eggs, I'm pretty sure would have been cooked in dripping, but I don't remember the HP sauce. Well OK sauce in our house.

We would dip the chips, whilst still very hot in the very yellow egg yolks - I remember egg yolks being yellower than they are today, but I'm also pretty sure that that is romantic nostalgia. I suspect we had egg and chips because they were cheap - most likely towards the end of the month when the money was getting low, but it didn't matter because I at least loved them.

Shirley Valentine - the film is often quoted when you look up egg and chips as it shows how the working class are perhaps hidebound by tradition - Shirley serves her husband egg and chips on Thursday when it should be steak and he is enraged. Watch it for a bit of nostalgia and a very gloomy picture of working class marriage.

I don't cook them today for two reasons. Firstly it has now been drummed into me over the years that chips are hugely unhealthy, and so they are a treat that I turn to when visiting restaurants. I fear there may also be a tiny bit of wishing not to be reminded of those working class origins, although I really don't know why because they were happy times. Anyway no chips, although when first married and for a few years I would have cooked them occasionally.

Secondly David pretty much hates eggs in all their forms - except for omelettes. And I think fried eggs top the list of the hated ways of cooking them. So it's not likely I shall be eating egg and chips anytime soon. After all they don't serve them up in transport cafés here. Well I don't think so and besides we are not likely to be visiting one. In fact they don't have them really. Which is a rather sad thought really. I shall probably never eat egg and chips again. Fish and chips yes, but not egg and chips.

So I wondered what the cooks of today are doing with the concept of egg and chips. Not a lot really. One approach is to somehow make it healthy - Oven egg and chips - Hungry Healthy Happy and Healthy egg and chips - BBC Good Food which usually means oven chips rather than fried ones, although of course, today you can get frozen chips or cook them in the air-fryer. And I have to say that neither of these look particularly tempting.

Dear Rachel Roddy, however, clung to the notion of egg and chips as comfort food and had two egg and chips offerings, neither of them traditional. However, before I get to them, let me give you a long quote from her, in an article on Osso Buco, because it's so lovely, and rather sums up the nostalgia of the British and their egg and chips:

"I am not sure if my Grandma used the same dripping two, or three times. Either way, in between frying sessions it would remain in the chip pan, set to thick, waxy white still with the basket nestled inside. Once back on the heat in readiness for chips – which would be wrapped in a tea-towel to dry – the chip pan was dangerous. We knew this as we had seen the public information advert in which a woman in horn rimmed glasses overfills her pan and it bursts into flames, also because Grandpa would warn us in the same serious voice he used when he said “Give over”.

Cautioned, we grandkids stood back as Grandma fried, lifting the basket from the rolling fat and tipping the thick, golden chips first on to kitchen towel for a blot, then on to plates. In another pan there would be eggs spluttering in dripping or lard. Slices of bread, buttered right to the edges, waited on the table. It would have been Monday, the day for egg and chips, a habit begun when my grandparents married, interrupted by the war, continued when they had my dad and beyond, earning new appreciation when us three grandchildren arrived and learned to dip chips in yolks."

The first of Rachel's recipes is a bit like a chip butty in a way, but in this case the sandwich is the egg - an omelette, which gives you a Chip omelette. It's very much a nostalgia food for her, reminding of days when renting and sharing a tiny flat in London as a student which she describes thus:

"I broke, whisked, poured and tilted the eggs around my flatmate’s Danish frying pan. Then, while the eggs were still wet enough for sticking, threw in the chips. Chips which, a few minutes before, I had brought back to life in the brown and cream microwave, an unrivalled way to reheat fish-and-chip-shop-chips because the thing most complained about (“it makes them soggy”) is exactly what you are after – ping!"

In lots of ways it's even more daggy than my mother's egg and chips, as the chips are just leftover chips from the fish and chips from the night before. And yet she derives comfort from it:

"Food is comfort for me when it is dependable; when I know what is coming"

Her second offering Fried potatoes and eggs is more Italian and she follows her Italian partner's way of cooking the potatoes - potatoes, not chips.

Which led me to discover that the Spanish have a dish called Huevos rotos (Broken eggs) which sort of follows the idea of the British egg and chips, although the potatoes are not chips. And there is usually ham although many people seem to think that the British eat egg and chips with gammon. Oh how I wish we could get British gammon here. It's not at all the same as our ham. Anyway we never had ham of any kind with ours - it was real, down on your luck food. I don't even remember the bread and butter, although there probably was some.

But back to the Spanish. I found three examples of this dish: Huevos rotos - New York Times; Huevos rotos - Spanish Sabores and Huevos rotos - Lisa and Tony Sierra/The Spruce Eats - which are all American sites which sort of makes sense I guess considering the huge Latin population in America.

So did anyone try to make fancy egg and chips? Well Heston Blumenthal has his thrice cooked chips of course, but there didn't seem to be a fancy egg and chips dish. I did find a few rather different ones, however if you define chips in different ways and add a few things: Egg and chips - Lisa La Barbero/Taste - her egg is poached and rests on crisps - well maybe they are very thinly sliced potatoes; David Chang's egg and chips - Spencooks/TikTok - David Chang's dish - he of Momofuku - is a bit more complicated, but looks pretty good; Fried egg and chips with foie and truffle - Spanish Recipes - the chips are string fries, and the extras are definitely rich man food and Potato and gochujang braised eggs - Ottolenghi who puts his eggs on a kind of rösti although the potato for the rösti is matchstick size, not grated. Trust him to come up with something that looks really great. David doesn't like chilli either however, so it's not going to be made here.

And then of course you start to get into shakshuka and other such similar things.

I guess these are examples of how the rich might eat egg and chips, but then maybe in the secrecy of the million dollar homes they just eat egg and chips with a cup of tea like the rest of us - well if we had a husband who liked fried eggs. They probably don't cook it themselves though.

I forgot to say that it apparently became a tradition in WW1 when the soldiers on the front would eat them. So maybe it's actually a French dish.

POSTSCRIPT

Those years gone by:

2023 - Vegetable sides - beginning with Petit pois à la française

2022 - LOVE - the secret ingredient - really?

2021 - Cassata - history on a plate

2020 - Corny clichés and silver linings

2019 - Damper

2018 - So do we keep taking the pills?

2017 - Maple syrup and bacon - in a cupcake

2016 - A day off