When the chips are done

Idoubt I’m the first columnist to have received rat poison through the mail but I bet I’m the first to write back to say thank you. For last week I mentioned my lack of rat bait and two days later some arrived. And though my benefactor wasn’t to know, her gift came just in time for my 63rd birthday.

As the rats tuck into the meal that betrays, my own thoughts turn to what to have for dinner. I am told that during the lockdown people have taken to high-end cookery. But now’s no time for haute cuisine. Now is a time for cuisine basse. My birthday dinner will be bacon, chips and glaucomic eggs. It’s food as food was meant to be.

You start with big, old, cheap potatoes. If they’ve got a name they’re too fancy. Peel more than you think you need. Then peel more.

The chips should be as long as you like and three-eighths of an inch wide by three-eighths of an inch deep. And no, there is no metric equivalent. If you can’t picture three-eighths of an inch you’re too young to cook chips.

Soak the raw chips in cold water. I don’t know why but that’s what my mother did and her chips were chips as Plato would have imagined chips if the potato had reached ancient Greece.

Soak the chips for as long as it takes to drink as much as you need of whatever you like – beer, wine, creme de menthe, it doesn’t matter; cuisine basse doesn’t do food pairings. Let happiness be your guide.

Once you’re in the mood to cook, put suitable music on – Carmina Burana is ideal – and heat some oil. Use a deep fryer if you must but it’s a coward’s gadget and you miss out on the Krakatoan thrill of an open saucepan.

When the oil swirls with menace drop a chip in. If the splash on your wrist makes you leap and scream the oil is hot enough. Drop the chips in one by one and enjoy the frothing. Cook them till they’re about to change colour then haul them out with the slotted spoon you haven’t got and put them aside.

Return to the creme de menthe while the chips cool, then assemble all the bits you need for the final burst because things are going to get dramatic.

Fire the oil back up and heat a frying pan and when both are smoking like schoolboys tip the chips into one and the bacon into another. Suddenly it will be the hot chaos of battle, all noise and smoke and fire alarms and fat that pings like shrapnel.

When the bacon has the texture of a Crunchie bar, pull it out and line a plate with it. Don’t drain off the fat. Fat is the point of bacon. If you don’t want fat, eat tofu.

When the chips are the colour you want in chips pile them onto the bacon and salt them. Use the salt from the sea that comes in chem lab crystals. Use far too much.

Crack three eggs into a bowl, fish out the bits of shell, then tip the eggs into the bacon pan and clamp a glass lid on them. The glass will be opaque in seconds. The eggs are done when the yolks have clouded like glaucoma. Slide the lot out to cover the chips. Salt them.

Take the plate to wherever you eat and plunge your knife into a yolk. It will bleed through the chips to the floor of bacon. Eat, be happy, cry, ‘‘Death to rats and viruses!’’ and raise a glass of creme de menthe to benefactors.