Cheesed of with posh crisps

Or, if I’m going with the current trend, the title of this column should in fact be “Mature Scottish cheddar cheesed off, with West Country chives and a hint of sea salt”.

You might have to strain your brain to remember this, but there was a time when the choice of the potato crisp fancier was beautifully simple.

In the pub on a Saturday night (before the days when we all started staring at our phones rather than having a conversation) you could choose from Salt and Vinegar, Cheese and Onion or Ready Salted. Maybe Prawn Cocktail, if you were in a particularly progressive establishment, with liberal views on thinly-sliced fried potato snack flavourings.

Back then, the introduction of crisps with ridges seemed pretty radical, especially when you consider that we’d only just got used to the idea of not needing to hunt for a little blue packet of salt so we could season the crisps ourselves (I once got two of them in a packet, and was the most popular kid in school for a week). The arrival of Ready Salted felt enormously decadent.

You knew what you were getting too, as the packets generally had a clear window, allowing potential purchasers to eye-up the mouth-watering contents in advance. Now, our snacks are too embarrassed to show themselves, hiding their pretentiousness in foily packaging, “for freshness”.

Slowly but surely, the humble crisp started getting all sophisticated. It began with the idea that we would assume adding the word “Sea” in front of “Salt” increased the yumminess of the slices of spud within. Soon, the onion had been booted out in favour of the chive, the cheese came in a variety of regional variations, and even the vinegar had taken part in an ill advised fling with some cider.

The insidious rise of the posh munchies (They all now seem to be “hand cooked”, which frankly sounds quite dangerous) appears to have reached epidemic level.

Just last week, I was confronted with “Scottish Langoustines with dill & lemon hand cooked crisps”, plus the geographic heritage of the main ingredients. I’m not even sure what at least one of those things is. I’m guessing the next step will be to inform me of the name of the person who hand-cooked them’s cat, and what music I should be listening to when I eat them.

Enough of these hipster munchies! Bring back the simple joy of a maximum of 2 flavours in my snack pack! Otherwise, soon they will have to sell them with an accompanying pamphlet, and we’ll all starve to death whilst trying to figure out what they’ll taste of.

Right – I’m off for a packet of artisan hand cooked Jersey potato slices, fried with pure Yak fat from the North East Sahara, with a hint of cracked black pepper, Kalamata Olives, Chilean Chorizo, and Fennel from Farmer Giles’ organic boutique herb emporium, 27 High Street, Pinge, with a dash of English oak-smoked Mediterranean garlic and hand-reared South Oxfordshire parsnip jus...

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 5th of June 2015. I know that, because I've seen it. It hasn't appeared on their website yet, which is a shame as I thought this was one of my better efforts, but if you want to see if it pops up and leave a suitably witty and erudite comment, take a look here.

Otherwise, please feel free to leave comments here. It doesn't happen very often, so when it does I feel special. Which is nice. Everyone needs to feel special from time to time. I tried to feel special in the supermarket once, but I'm banned from Tesco now.

Things have got silly in Snacksville, haven't they? Having said that, they're getting pretty silly everywhere else as well. We seem to have started thinking food is only edible if it's either massively retro, 'ironic', or poncily presented (bread served in a flat cap, desserts in a Kilner jar, 'old-fashioned' lemonade) or featuring allegedly the finest ingredients on the planet, which is just an excuse to charge a load more anyway.

Damn - there goes my blood pressure again...

(CD singles time - Queen's "Heaven For Everyone" is currently getting a high-speed, laser-read, spin.)

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