Tuesday 14 February 2017

Andy Capp's Cheddar Fries

This is weird. I never liked the Andy Capp cartoon strip which appeared in the Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror. It's a cartoon about a working class skiver who never actually seems to work. He lives in Hartlepool which is in the North of England, and somehow I've never found the cartoon at all funny. Of course I come from the South of England which is quite a different place. You can find out more about Andy on Wikipedia if you want.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered the character was fronting a brand of crispy snacks in the United States! Not to mention being really big in North Carolina... that just seems so weird. Andy Capp seems such an archetypical North of England character (pigeon racing, flat cap, in the pub all the time - I'm surprised he doesn't have a whippet but that might be too much hard work for him). Of course I've not been to North Carolina so perhaps people there are fans of pigeon racing too. Who knows? Not me, that's for sure.

Anyway, I discovered I could buy a single packet online. So I did.

I thought these were pretty good and and Slightly Red Haired Bristolian liked them too. I quite enjoyed this pretend fry (chip)-shaped crispy snack made of a mix of cornmeal and dried potatoes. A very nice texture and lovely light bite. Great cheddar taste, really very nice, and a good scattering of some sort of herby goodness (not exactly one of my 5 a day though) and probably the dried chives mentioned in the list of ingredients.

Tech tech taste tester said he wasn't mad for this shape of snack; he claimed they are difficult to eat, but I think they deserve a hearty thumbs up. Very nice indeed.

By the way, I do know people from the North of England who are not like Andy Capp in any way. They don't wear flat caps or race pigeons, and I'm fairly sure they've never owned a whippet and have worked hard all their lives. I'm fairly sure that some of them enjoy a visit to the local pub but, hey! that doesn't make you a skiver. In fact the whippet owners I know are all frightfully posh so it's a different sort of whippet-owning: perhaps I should never have mentioned it.

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