"Two pounds?" said brewery worker Norman Loftus, gazing in disbelief at the neat list of "smaller things" on the a la carte list at Battered. "For scraps? Tell me I'm hallucinating on mushy peas."
The reaction has been widely shared in Yorkshire this week at the first known appearance of fryers' waste - also known as bits, shoddy and nips - as a dish on its own. Though invitingly golden-brown, the scraps are none the less just that: leftover fragments of batter sieved from beef dripping in the deep pan.
Up to now, they have always come as a small, and invariably free, extra to takeaway fish and chips. Any not scattered on customers' portions at the chippie are thrown out at the end of the day.
The £2 bowls, piled high with scraps, come in three variants - zested and juiced with lemon, sprinkled with chilli flakes and mixed with rock pepper or nutmeg. But
Battered's head chef, Robert Charnley, says: "That's only the beginning - we're keen to expand our scraps offering. Customers have started coming up with suggestions for other ingredients to mix in."
But Mr Hawkins' pioneering dish faces resistance from healthy eaters, including a customer, Catharine Ufondu. She screwed up her face in horror as her son Andrew tried a particularly plump scrap. "I wouldn't pay £2 for what's basically waste," he said. "But I can see that there could be something in scraps if you mix them with more interesting things."
No comments:
Post a Comment