The late Auberon Waugh, a hugely entertaining snob of the first order, wrote in a column decades ago that he loved the way the juxtaposition of cod wars and potato blight had conspired to make that great British culinary invention, fish and chips, a rarity.
That comment told you quite a lot about the man making it. But if his experience of fish and chips had been restricted to London, and most of all those chippies in the West End that even proclaimed in lights that they served the aforementioned "great British invention", I'd have been inclined to sympathise with him.
For proper fish and chips - and they exist just as surely as good coquilles St Jacques or a great plateau de fruits de mer - you need to head north. But how far north?
Over at Salut! Sunderland, I have set something rolling with a selection of truly great fish and chip shops known to my fellow Sunderland supporters.
This is not as parochial an exercise as it sounds. As I write, no one has recommended anywhere in Sunderland itself except one very close to the Stadium of Light.
The locations collecting the votes are, so far, in Bishop Auckland, Whitby, Seahouses, Seaham, South Shields, Tynemouth ... the list goes on; but also includes not one but two joints in the small Yorkshire town of Wetherby, well known to travelling football supporters heading to or from the North East. Choose between the Wetherby Whaler and the Frying Pan.
And at least a couple of people have stated that Yorkshire, generally, is the place - nearly wrote plaice, but no more fish humour, please, I've haddock up to here - for the best fare.
I have been to neither Wetherby fish and chip shop mentioned. My own childhood memories of Robinson's, at the corner of Diamond Street and Byerley Road, Shildon take some beating, but that may be partly a result of the nostalgic fillip of running into the Robinsons' daughter in the back of a tour bus in Jaipur a couple of years ago.
But it occurs to me that with Salut! vast and far-flung, well OK far-flung, readership, there will be contenders from all over the country and beyond. Not least since the photo, from the Flickr pages of Punzy, who reckons the illustrated dish was one of the finest he'd come across, was taken in Singapore.
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