Very few foods suit absolutely every occasion. Rice, oranges, certain cuts of beef, nice salads, specific chocolate bars, and crisps. All types of crisps. Crisps – the most versatile food group in the world. Pop them on a tray, canapés! Pile them in a bowl, main course at a picnic! Tear down the side of a packet, romantic meal for two! Smoosh them around with some olive oil like Jamie Oliver would, and blah blah… ENOUGH! Enough of this! Let’s just cut to the custard. Here’s a list of the ten greatest crisps of all time ever…
Ready Salted Hula Hoops
A great crisp doesn’t need to be over-complicated with expensive ingredients like freshly chiselled mountain salt, it can be simple. You want salt? Get the bog standard stuff from your salt guy. You want nice crisps? Get Hula Hoops. They’re salty, they’re cylindrical, and above anything else, if you wear them on your fingers they make for hilarious comedy props.
Cheese and Onion Walkers
In real life if you ate cheese with onions it would be a bad meal followed by a manic dash to the bathroom to scrape your tongue and shout at yourself in the mirror. It’s a pungent, ill-fitting combination. And yet put this nightmare combo together as a crisp flavour, and you’ve got a small perfectly formed slice of heaven. It’s a mystery that literally no one will ever solve.
Wotsits
Because of the bright orangeness, their association with the absurdly maligned and needlessly derided beautiful red-head community, and the fact that they look like ET’s dick, some people have an aversion to Wotsits. Those people are fucking idiots. These are amazing!
Flame Grilled Steak McCoy’s
Crisp aficionados swear by these. They’ve got crinkles in them, which scientists will tell you do something weird to the area of your brain responsible for detecting crunchiness, and because you’re essentially dealing with a crisp full of small ditches, they taste stronger. They’re nice. They make you feel happy like monkey.
Frazzles
For sheer artistic excellence, these are amazing. They look like actual rashers of bacon, and yet somehow THEY’RE CRISPS. That’s some mind-boggling Heston Blumenthal shit, yo! I should probably point out that contrary to the weird tone I just adopted, there is nothing remotely STREET about eating these.
More…
Seabrook Crisps: An Appreciation
The Greatest Thing I Ever Ate: Prawn Cocktail Crisps In The 80s
Pickled Onion Monster Munch
If you’ve ever had a weeping mouth ulcer, you’ll know all about the stark pleasure/pain divide that comes from pressing down on it with a Pickled Onion Monster Munch. It’s like there’s an S&M bondage party going on in your mouth. These are basically sluts.
Skips
Whenever a food show judge boasts that something is melting in their mouth, I presume they’re sharing a packet of Skips. They’re light as a feather. Marks and Spencers actually do a fantastic version of these in their “Prawn Cocktail Flavour Crisps” aisle, but I’d still probably just go with the originals. What shape are they though? Are they supposed to be lovely flowers?
Salt And Vinegar Walkers
I have a similar thing with Salt and Vinegar Walkers as I do with Corn Flakes. I spend most of my life slagging them off behind their backs, then once in a while I’ll get lumbered with them and undergo a wild renaissance. I LOVE THEM, they’re so delicious, yada yada yada! I’ll eat nothing else for about a week, and then I’ll drop them like a bad habit. They remind me that, deep down, I’m an a-hole.
Quavers
Sniff these and they smell like bad feet, touch them and they feel like giant flakes of old mummified skin. Yet pop one of these in your mouth and you’ll go on a magic carpet ride through all of the best emotions – joy, happiness, joy again, some more joy, a bit more happiness. Joy. Possibly some laughter. Joy again.
Lightly Salted Kettle Chips
Allocating the final slot in this list was an impossible task, akin to Sophie’s Choice but quite clearly much less devastating. But it was hard. I thought about my love of Nik Naks, and then Space Raiders. I wondered about Spicy Tomato Snaps. Pringles. And then I remembered how sophisticated I’ve become, and how sometimes I like to eat Kettle Chips. I’m a bit like His Majesty the Queen.
Now what did I miss?
