So, while chipping away at ideas that might or might not need airing in this column, I happened across the latest newsletter from Sunday Times Food Weekly (to which anyone interested in food really should subscribe, because it is excellent).
In this recent missive, ST food editor Hilary Biller informed us that tomato-sauce-flavoured chips have been relegated to the dustbin of history.
What? You might well be horrified.
But it is sadly true. In the last few months, SA snack manufacturer Simba Chips has conducted a widespread survey among chip-eaters. In its “Choose Me or Lose Me” #SaveYourFlava campaign, Simba asked customers to vote to save one of three classic crisp flavours: All Gold Tomato Sauce, Cheese & Onion and Salt & Vinegar. The least popular would be discontinued to “make way for new arrivals”.
Here’s the bad news. Tomato Sauce crisps received only 18.01% of the vote, which means that the tangy artificial red dust on crinkle-cut layers will soon be no more. (In even sadder news, salt & vinegar crisps are also over; it seems cheese & onion are the new black, or the new orange, or something.)
So be it. The world moves on, and food fashions change with it. What this episode evoked in my memory, however, was a word from my childhood, which was always followed by an exclamation mark: “Chips!”
This has nothing to do with Jon and Ponch, the beefy, khaki-clad, motorcycle-riding California cops in a terrible US TV series which was one of the few foreign offerings during the early days of SABC TV.
No, “chips!” is what we shouted whenever we were involved in something of which our parents, teachers or prefects might disapprove. This miscreancy might have involved silkworm-racing, or dwarf-mongoose-baiting, or drawing on walls with wax crayons, or something even more sinister. Whatever it was, some diminutive human allies would always be put on guard to watch for those who might spoil our fun.
When the intruding figures of authority were school prefects, the warning cry was: “Chips! Pricks!”
Perhaps he knows which way to point his rocket when the chips are down, but if I saw him in my neighbourhood I’d be sure to shout: ‘Chips! Pricks!’
It took me many years to discover that “pricks”, the pejorative word for primary-school prefects, had profane associations with a part of the male anatomy. I’ve often wondered if my small schoolmates knew this. I like to think they were as innocent as I was, and thought the word “pricks” referred to the sharpened HB pencils carried in the many-badged blazer pockets of these pompous pupils.
Regardless of understanding, “Chips! Pricks!” is what we shouted. No-one has an adequate explanation for why slim fried potatoes were invoked as a warning cry. But the chip is an interesting foodstuff in other etymological ways.
First, there is the word “chipper”, mainly used in the UK but not unknown in SA as a synonym for happy, bright and cheerful.
According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, “chipper” comes from the word “kipper” — not the fish, but an adjective of unknown origins, which for some reason in the early 1800s meant “lively, nimble, active and brisk”.
A chipper, as in a person whose job it is to make chips, is a much older word, dating back to the 1500s.
Yes, the world has had fish ’n chips for more than 500 years. The word “chip”, originally associated with bits of stone flaked off from rocks in a quarry, was applied to potato chips from the 1760s, although the actual potato chip predated the word.
The chip used by irresponsible gamblers came later. The “small disc or counter used in a game of chance” was first recorded in 1840, says the OED.
And as for silicone chips, those money-spinning particles that effectively sent Jeff Bezos into space for a whole 11 minutes, these “thin, tiny squares of semi-conducting material” got their name only in 1962.
Bezos, whose Danish father Ted Jorgenson owned a bicycle shop, might be a chip off the old block in entrepreneurial terms. Perhaps he knows which way to point his rocket when the chips are down, but if I saw him in my neighbourhood I’d be sure to shout: “Chips! Pricks!”
Some might disagree, but however we feel about pricks, I think we will all mourn the loss of tomato-sauce flavoured chips.
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