Chip of the old block

Some years ago I discovered the fresh-made banana chip. It was not something serendipitous, except on a very personal level – after all, it was a delightful moment of discovery for me as an individual, though it was known of for a very long time by various friends, who then introduced me to it and needed to keep me stocked for many months until I made another discovery: my very own supplier. And, since I and my very own family and my various friends are all ardent supporters of the great banana chip cause, it was, in effect, manna from a heaven that smelled deliciously of fresh hot banana chips fried in a deep kettle of traditionally prescribed coconut oil. Now I have become so used to the concept that I can even discriminate between what is fresh and what has been done a few hours ago, whether the bananas came from a tree close to the Kerala border, or further down the coast (okay, so I may be stretching it a bit on that one, but you know what I mean!).

Perhaps one of the nicest things about buying fresh-made banana chips is watching the craftsman make them. And it is indeed a craft, combining artistry with manual dexterity with a certain instinctual knowledge of what, when, how and how much. The chappie who has his fryer set up in the vegetable market close to where we live is most talented in his own way, producing crisp, hot, perfectly salted chips within an amazingly short time, without much of a slip ’tween cup…well, frying pan, actually…and lip (mine).

The process begins with bananas, logically enough. But these are not the ordinary bananas, and not the plantains generally used to make chips of a kind or a vegetable dish, but the long, gently curved, tough skinned, hard fruit native to the state of Kerala. It is peeled, left ready on a large aluminium plate that covers the oil most of the time. The fire under the oil is started and, when delicate spirals of smoke waft up from the surface of the fat, my man picks up a crude plastic-based madeleine and runs the banana along its blade, so fast that I lose count of the slices created by the initial blur of action. The slices fall directly into the oil, sizzling as they touch it, and cluster on top, swirling a little, dipping into the liquid, doing their own little dance. Then the man sets down the cutter and whatever bananas may be left and with bare hands, dips into a bowl of water mixed with salt and turmeric powder and sprinkles some, with a seemingly hazardous gesture, over the cooking chips. There is a prolonged crackle and sizzle, hot fat spitting and sputtering as the spiced water makes contact. Then, with a wonderful flourish, he scoops out the done crisp morsels and scatters them into a vast metal colander to drain. “Careful, it’s hot,” he warns in his Malayalam-Tamil-Hindi patois, as I greedily reach for a few and pop them into my eager mouth, shocked by the burn but savouring every crunch of the fresh snack.

There is a special pleasure in the chip made thusly, even for someone who generally does not allow herself to indulge in junk food, especially of the salty kind. My uncle, in his infinite wisdom and with the devilish desire to shock a niece he does not yet see as grown up, told me once that a certain community of chip-makers from Kerala supply the salt by spitting into the oil. That story notwithstanding, the plain, lightly salted version – sprinkled with salted water from a pan, not with spit – is perhaps the best. I have sampled the cheese-flavoured, the tomato-flavoured, the pepper-flavoured, the chilli-flavoured, even the Manchurian-flavoured (“Ew!” is the most polite I can be about that last) fresh-made banana chip and conclude with a satisfied burp (expressed in a most ladylike manner, of course) that it is always the basic that wins the contest…not that there is one, of course!