The chip, the grease, the salt, the vinegar

Diners are lining up at the wagons again

I know. It’s the busiest time of the year. Potluck season. Everything is coming to an end.

Ham and potato salad month. Sliced ham, shaved ham, smoked, honeyed … cubed or mashed spud salad, wet or dry, with or without peas, maybe a little mmm-mmm mustard. Beets making their way into it from Newfoundland.

And then there’s your meatballs, your oven rice, your Russian chicken, barbecued ribs, chicken and broccoli casserole (Chicken Divine) with a touch of curry … man, oh man. Your Woolworth’s Lemon Jello icebox cheesecake .… But it’s another season, too.

It’s Chip Wagon Season. A reprieve from our discontented winter of the frozen fry. People are lining up everywhere. Talking. Joking. Mingling. Making every kind of comment on the heat, the cold, the flies, the frost, trips to Boston, the expansion draft … . Nobody’ll be lining up at no wagon for no frozen fries.

My first chip? Earl Butts’s chip wagon on Brookside Street in Glace Bay. In front of McKinlay’s Pop factory. Me and Ma. What was it? 1964?

Poor Earl died though, not long after my introduction to this most simple and delicious dining experience: The chip, the grease, the salt, the vinegar. Life itself. Leaving me with only one recourse: To set out on foot. I ventured on to “thee” chip wagon, down by the Russel Theatre in the Bay (still going full bore on the other side of the bridge). And then on to Mike’s Lunch — Diner, OK,, but the next closest thing to a wagon. And Teddy’s. (I was driving taxi when Steve of Mike’s Lunch moved to the Sterling… and I ate there so much I started to blend in with the wallpaper.

I dug into this column thinking to arrange an Us vs Them type argument: the chip (real) vs the fry (manufactured), but the fact is you can’t compare them. They’re two different things. Apples and oranges. Day and night. Jekyll and Hyde.

Fact is, I won’t turn down a frozen fry, but it’s settling at best. True, we ate mountains of fries after Saturday morning skating at the Forum as youngsters, and loved them. We dreamed over them, swapped manly stories, had a few laughs. But we were callow then. We knew neither the complexities nor the simplicities of taste. And as we grew up in gustatory blindness, we came to rely on artifice. Tricks. Gravy. Believing we were sophisticated.

I’ll allow that gravy is better on a fry than on a cChip, but that only proves that the frozen fry needs all the help it can get: ketchup, gravy, cheese ... fabrications like crinkles, curls, beer batter! (Fuzzy Bacich, former proprietor of Fuzzy’s [still scrumptious] Fries, wouldn’t allow his patrons to put ketchup on his chips. You bought them? So what? He created them! You never really “buy” a Ferrari either.)

Fries also must be consumed with other foods: hotdogs, burgers, etc. They rarely stand alone. Granted, maybe that makes the fry more sociable, as the cChip, like your average cat, prefers its in- dependence. The chip might come to a hotdog, a burger, a nice piece of fish in batter, if wooed properly, but generally it likes its own company.

I didn’t mention vinegar on the fry because it doesn’t work. Vinegar dissolves the fry but lingers on the surface of the real chip, like words on music, until the salt sticks it and a song is born.

The chip is a thing unto itself. Unlike its pretender, the bona fide chip has heft, substance, integrity. The aroma is irresistible. You can’t pass within 100 metres of a chip wagon and keep going.

Ultimately, fries are to chips what pyjamas are to pants. There’s a time for everything.

Here’s to the wagoners and purveyors of fine chips everywhere.

Bon appetite.