Does our quest for culinary perfection end in salt ...or sauce?

FIFTY years ago, British food was a global joke and eating out a distinct lottery – insolent waiters, vegetables boiled to extinction, beef with the moo roasted out of it and hard, technicolor dishes of the cutlet-frilled order vaunted by such terrifying figures as the late Fanny Cradock.

Today ours is a land of celebrity chefs and gastroporn telly. We no longer have to buy olive oil at the chemist or procure spaghetti in cans with tomato sauce.

There are now untold and fabled places for eating out – La Gavroche in London, helmed by Michel Roux Jnr; Raymond Blanc’s Le Manoir Aux Quat’ Saisons; Heston Blumenthal’s extraordinary fare – egg-and-bacon ice-cream, anyone? – at The Fat Duck in Bray-on-Thames.

Nor is Scotland lacking. Indeed, some of our finest eateries are in unexpected places: The Clachaig Inn in Glencoe, The Three Chimneys on Skye, The Peat Inn in an otherwise unremarkable part of Fife. Even Britain’s remotest pub – The Old Forge at Inverie, in wildest Knoydart – has a menu that changes ‘every day to reflect the daily catch, with langoustines creel-caught outside the pub and a local scallop diver,’ pants a stately magazine.

So when the The Lonely Planet travel guide decided to rate the best eating experiences in all the world, what fare topped the poll of British possibilities in their Ultimate Eat List?

Why, fish and chips in Stonehaven, of course – to be precise, at The Bay in that pleasant Kincardineshire port. It offers ‘the best fish and chips in the world’, enthuses The Lonely Planet – suggesting an order of battered cod, a large portion of chips and a can of Irn-Bru, for the benefit of readers who aren’t Scottish and might not know.

THE pundits wisely dodge the issue of where fish and chips was invented. Dundee, among many other places, claims the laurels but we know it was the Belgians who devised les frites, our Jewish community introduced deep-fried fish to London, and some bright spark duly combined the two in the 1860s.

That such homely fare could trump the ingenuities of, say, Tom Kitchin or Gordon Ramsay reflects both the status of fish and chips as a national treasure – on Churchill’s personal orders, it was never once rationed during the war, no doubt fearing Marxist insurrection in Glasgow – and that food is most delicious when we are really hungry.

On a jolly earlier this year and as a guest of tourist agencies, I was treated to a slap-up meal at a famous restaurant yards from the Irish border. There is a two-year waiting list for a table at Neven Maguire’s MacNean House and Restaurant and folk think nothing of driving from Dublin, if only to say they have dined there.

Such is its fame that I threw Calvinist caution to the winds and donned a maroon velvet blazer. Maguire, a TV personality and a household name throughout the Oul’ Sod, toured the dining room before serving began, meeting us all and posing for photographs.

Course after course followed – dainty portions on glossy plates: a bewildering succession of amuse-bouches and flamed this and soused that, garnished with foams and gels and smoking dry ice and capped with glorious coffee and petits-four worthy of celebration in verse.

It was sensational. It was an experience. Neven Maguire is a lovely, down-to-earth man. (He even enthused over my blazer.) But when I look back at my best memories of food, that glamorous night out is largely eclipsed by homelier things.

The freshly made pancake my grandmother, four decades ago, quickly lashed with salty butter, thrust into my paw and shooed me affectionately outside to savour. The hamburger I enjoyed on Oban pier. The soup at the home of a teacher’s mum, late one frosty 1979 evening in Jordanhill, after our Scripture Union group had rounded the district carol singing for charity.

My mother’s roast chicken; the mushroom pizza Jenners used to served at its sadly past tense restaurant in Edinburgh… the extraordinary but toothsome feed of pasta and steak good friends threw together after an afternoon of much walking on another Irish holiday. Or my occasional and guilty midnight snack of toasted cheese. (It must be extra-mature cheddar and the bread, carbonised at the edges, must be wholemeal.)

That is usually a solitary experience. The meals we best remember tend to involve family and friends, like the majestic clootie dumpling my mother made on the first day of March as the ‘Beast from the East’ pummelled us all into so much Siberia. It was the ultimate comfort food and perfect for the Arctic conditions outside.

OR particular places, like the roast venison served up at a 2003 wedding on Raasay, followed by an unabashed bramble pie and real custard before the night dissolved in Gaelic song and fireworks. It may even have led to dancing.

And there is particular joy in seeing people savour a meal you have prepared yourself, especially if you are wise and remember that many a host’s reputation has been built on the ability to cook just three or four dishes to perfection.

The simplest are the hardest to master. I have a repertoire of pasta dishes, but it took me years to get the hang of cooking pasta itself. Most people cook it too long in not nearly enough water and with but a teaspoon or two of salt when it howls for a handful.

It was only a couple of years back I mastered macaroni cheese – such oozing, soughtafter fare there are restaurants in America serving nothing else. Of all cookery writers, I find Nigel Slater the best because he typically uses only three or four ingredients when, say, Jamie Oliver has you on a trolley dash round Waitrose wearily buying dozens.

The Bay only opened its doors in 2006 and remains ‘proud to serve locally sourced, sustainable fish and chips from our shop on the Stonehaven seafront… we think it tastes better when you’re eating great food that doesn’t cost the earth’.

Calum Richardson, your twinkly host, has won stacks of awards, including Britain’s Young Fish Fryer of the Year.

All the packaging is biodegradable; all the food waste is composted. Even the starch in the oil after a night’s frying is filtered out and donated to a herd of happy local pigs.

Richardson is particularly proud of the local RNLI, weekly donating bacon and sausages for the local lifeboat crew to enjoy after drills or call-outs.

Reviews on the notorious TripAdvisor website range from fawning to ecstatic, and of an evening the queue stretches down the street.

But where, one wonders, does Calum stand on that issue that has long and sorely divided Scotland – salt and vinegar or salt and sauce?