Tortilla chips arrived, and everything changed

For those of us raised on little blue bags of salt, these exotic newcomers were bar snack heaven

A phrase which is much overused these days is “game-changer”. It was apparently first recorded in 1993 so it is relatively new, but just as “legend” seems to apply, on social media at least, to any moderately talented person, so a nice takeaway or salad is nowadays referred to as a game-changer.

However, I remember a moment, long before this now hackneyed phrase was invented, when the game really did change – in the world of bar snacks, at least.

The year was 1982 and I was wasting part of my youth at the Old Neptune on Whitstable beach. It was my friends’ and my local and we would meet up there most days. In the bar snacks department, this legendary pub was no different to any other, stocking various flavours of crisps and peanuts on those cardboard wall-mounted devices which – in those days – would slowly reveal a girl beneath as each packet was bought.

To liven up the pub’s snack offer we would buy a packet of cheese and onion and one of salt and vinegar and mix them together: we thought the resulting taste was a bit like prawn cocktail. That is how ready we were for something new.

Then one day, someone came back from the bar clutching a large bag of things called tortilla chips. They were made from corn rather than potato, fiercely spicy and unlike anything we had seen before. We stared at them as if they had just landed from another planet. What sorcery was this? They broke the rules in so many ways. The size of the bag was four times that of a normal bag of crisps, the price five times higher and the heat was very “grown-up”. This was a snack for adults in a world which had stagnated.

I had watched in my childhood as crisps went from rummaging around for a little blue bag of salt to roast lamb and mint sauce flavour. The flavourings may have been getting more adventurous, but they were still being applied to the same small discs of fried potato.

This was followed by a TV advertising campaign which featured Phileas Fogg from Jules Verne’s Around The World in 80 Days bringing back snacks from his travels. Tortilla chips were joined by “Mignons Morceaux” and “Punjab Puri”, not to mention the nonspicy “Californian Corn Chip”.

The world of snacks never looked back. If you ever wonder how we ended up with whole supermarket aisles full of huge, oversized bags of salty crispy things to be stuffed into the mouths of huge, oversized people, then this was the start of the whole process. It seemed the time was right for the UK’s post-war parsimony to be overturned, and where better to start than the size of crisp packets? Portion size went out of the window, along with the nation’s waistline.

In time Phileas Fogg was bought by United Biscuits, yet another small, irreverent, original company was swallowed up by the clunky world of big business, and market share was lost. Doritos took over; the crisp companies reacted with bigger bags and multipacks.

A few years later, a friend opened a Mexican restaurant in Canterbury and we finally got to taste a proper tortilla chip. He imported corn tortillas then cut up and fried them, so at dinner you would be eating chips cooked that morning. They were a revelation, and so I am sharing the recipe today.

Snacks in a bag come with flavourings already applied, of course (apart from that little blue sachet I remember from childhood). But proper nachos should be plain, then sprinkled with grated cheese and baked in the oven or grilled until the cheese melts, then served with salsa, sour cream and pickled jalapeños.

So if you want to offer your friends a legendary, game-changing evening, then switch on the football, buy a load of Mexican beer (limes in the necks of the bottles are optional) and cook up some nachos.

We stared at the tortilla chips as if they were from another planet. What sorcery was this?

Proper nachos should be plain, then sprinkled with grated cheese and baked until it melts