Egg and Chips Sandwich

Egg and chips is already a meal. It arrives on a plate with a mug of tea, the fried egg sitting beside the pile of chips, and the bread is just there at the side of the table. The egg and chips sandwich is what happens when someone reaches for that bread instead of a fork. A cook lifts the egg and a handful of chips onto a slice of buttered white, lays the second slice over, and presses down until the yolk gives way under it. That press, more than anything, turns the plate into a sandwich. Loose chips will not hold between bread on their own; they slide and tip and fall out of the sides. The broken yolk, run down warm and thick over the potato, glues the pile into one mass you can pick up, and it is the only sauce the thing carries.

For the press to work the yolk has to be liquid, so the egg is fried gently and pulled while the white is just set and the centre still wobbles, then broken at the fold while it is hot enough to soak in rather than sit on top. Cooked a minute too long, the yolk sets to a pale crumbly disc and there is nothing left to bind with, leaving the chips dry and the bite a mouthful of loose starch.

The chips matter as much. The sandwich wants the soft, thick, floury kind from a chip shop, laid a single layer deep so they bend with the bread; a thin fry stays rigid and stabs through the slice, and a crisp shoestring shatters and spills. Soft chips give, take the yolk into their fluffy centres, and settle flat under the press while the butter underneath goes slack against their heat and seals the bottom slice so it holds rather than soaks straight through.

The good bite is the one where the yolk has found the chips. Press down and a thick line of it runs along the seam of the potato, pooling in the floury split where a chip has cracked open, and the bread above it turns half translucent and faintly gold where the heat and the fat have come through the slice. The chip underneath is soft and barely warm at the centre, its edge still firm enough to feel, and the bread folds around the whole pile and gives at the first bite and is gone before you have noticed it. A shake of brown sauce cuts across it with malt and tamarind, a splash of vinegar sharpens the same spot, and the sandwich is eaten fast because it stiffens as it cools and is only itself while the yolk still runs.

It belongs to a particular room. The egg and chips sandwich is greasy-spoon and transport-caff food, ordered across a Formica counter and written on the board between the bacon roll and the sausage bap, and it is made the same way in home kitchens on a tired evening when egg and chips is already on the table and the bread is just there to carry it. It sits in a small family of cheap British carb-on-carb. The chip butty is chips and butter alone, no egg; the egg banjo is a fried egg in bread with no chips at all; and this round holds both, the potato and the egg in one fold, the richest of the three for being the one with a yolk to break.

The Estaminet and the Egg Banjo

Nobody invented egg and chips as a plate and no date marks its start, yet the record of where it took hold is unusually specific. It was a favourite of British soldiers behind the lines on the Western Front during the First World War, eaten at the small cafe-bars called estaminets in the villages of northern France and Belgium, which sold cheap wine, beer, and a reliable plate of oeufs et frites to men out of the trenches. That pairing of fried egg and fried potato came home with the generation that survived, as ordinary comfort food, and the cafe culture that served it helped shape the British greasy spoon that keeps it on the board now.

The bread-bound form runs through the same army. The egg banjo, a runny fried egg pressed between two thick slices of buttered white, has been a fixture of British military mess and field cooking since at least the First World War. The name is for the motion a soldier makes wiping spilled yolk off his front with one hand while the sandwich is held out to the side in the other, an accidental impression of strumming. Add the chips the soldiers already ate by the plateful and the banjo becomes the egg and chips sandwich, though no one seems to have set down the moment the two were first folded together.

The plain butty half of the family has a sharper paper trail. The chip butty is a creature of the industrial north of England, where the fish and chip shop spread fast through the mill and mining towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire from the 1860s on, cheap potato fuel for cheap labour, and where butty is local shorthand for bread and butter. The National Federation of Fish Friers traces the buttered chip sandwich to Mr Lees, by its account Britain's second-ever fish and chip shop, opened in Oldham, Lancashire, in 1863. Slide a soft-fried egg in alongside those chips and you have the warmer, messier cousin of a sandwich that the chip shops of Oldham were already selling more than a century and a half ago.