PROPER Fish ‘n’ Proper Chips.... Oh I do like to live beside the seaside.

I must state at the onset, I love food. I love eating it, cooking it, shopping for it, reading about it and learning about it. I am a devoted ‘live to eat’ kinda’ gal.

When I was a child in the eighties, I loved my mum’s ‘chicken curry’. This consisted of left over roast chicken, fried with onions and mushrooms with clover yellow curry powder and water mixed in. It would be served in a well at the centre of a rice circle.

Since then she’s bought a wok and has a subscription to the BBC’s ‘Good Food’ magazine and consequently, the dishes have gotten correspondingly more authentic and delicious. However, in 1986, it was heady, exotic and very tasty.

My shelves now heave under the tomes of Yotam Ottolenghi, Claudia Roden, Anjum Anand and Nigella....love Nigella. I use sumac and pomegranate molasses, fennel seeds and panch phoran and it is rare that concurrent days pass without garlic and chilli peppering the plate and the palate in my house.

However, sometimes, I crave something with no strong flavours, no whistle around your nostril zing or smell. I just want comfort and crunch and fat. So it was I was in Penarth’s ‘The Pilot’ recently and I ordered their fish and chips.

There can be few meals more nostalgia building but sadly, more often disappointing, than fish and chips. Many times I have just “fancied them” then been wholly underwhelmed upon their arrival.

My dad swears blind that they were better when he was young, the batter crisper and darker, the chips fried in lard and that nowadays, ‘They’re just not the same,’ muttered with a heart-felt sadness.

‘The Magpie’ in Whitby, consistently lives up to the hype, but North Yorkshire is a little far to pop on a “fancy” and besides, I live by the sea, I shouldn’t have to travel more than a mile or so from my door to get just what I fancied.

When the plate arrived, there was a little pot of something resembling an avocado smoothie I may have tried to wean my children on. I tried it. It was pea puree. Not an unpleasant taste but I wanted texture, I have teeth. My concern began to grow, my shoulders began to sag.

However and it is an however that needs emphasis, the first taste of the flaky fish in its crispy coat of deep orange batter and I was all shoulders back, head-up perky. I tried a chip, fat and crunchy on the outside, all feathery and flossy on the inside. Another mouth-full of fish, this time smeared with a dollop of tartar sauce. Whole capers and slithers of gherkins, cwtching and cosy in their mayonnaise bed and whilst having a piquant pull on the taste-buds affection, nonetheless wrapping around the fish in a comforting cuddle. I was happy. It really is a joy when a bit of what you fancy is as fabulous as you’d hoped.

Follow Alison on Twitter @ASPwriter.