What is it about fish and chips cooked at the chippie that makes one's mouth water? I ask because apart from the smell of bacon cooking, I can't think of any other food which excite my taste buds as much.

Although we have an excellent chippie in my village, I have seldom used it during the past decade. Things changed a month ago when my ageing mother, who is recovering from a long illness, suddenly declared that she fancied fish and chips. She didn't want a plate of fish and chips cooked at home, she wanted the real thing - wrapped in paper, splash of malt vinegar and a generous shake of salt.

While standing in the queue watching the cook ladle copious amounts of raw chips into the hot fat, the woman ahead of me, who was buying fish and chips for her children, suddenly changed her order from three portions to four, but looked a little guilty at doing so. Turning to me, she said: "I don't know what it is about the smell, I'd intended to give the children a treat, but that chip smell has got to me. Perhaps it's conjured up childhood memories, perhaps I am hungry, I don't know. But I do know I have just got to get myself a portion too."

I knew exactly what she meant and admit that, after unwrapping my mother's fish and chips, I returned to the chippie and bought myself a portion, too.

Perfect chips, according to award-winning chef Heston Blumenthal, from The Fat Duck, Bray, are crispy on the outside and light and fluffy on the inside. To achieve this he advocates using the charlotte or belle de fontenay potato varieties, whereas most other chefs endorse the Oxford-based British Potato Council's recommendations by using varieties such as King Edward, Maris Piper or Sante varieties. Desiree, Cara and Wilja are also popular.

Some top chefs, including Oxfordshire's Antony Worrall Thompson, use Mayan Gold, a Peruvian variety now grown in the UK. Mayan Gold is the first new potato variety to be grown in Britain for 400 years and is now highly prized for its yellow flesh, nutty taste and superior appearance. Indeed, it's being hailed as the potato that provides a buttery taste without the butter.

Heston Blumenthal cooks his chips twice in groundnut oil to obtain the perfect chip, though he does use rendered beef fat and goose or duck fat at times for added flavour. Sometimes he cooks them in a mix of ground nut oil and rendered fat.

First, he cuts his chips and places them straight into a bowl placed under cold running water to rinse off some of the starch, then drains them and plunges them into a large pan of boiling, unsalted water and allows them to simmer for about ten minutes. These boiled chips are then cooled, preferably overnight in a cold fridge before cooking them in a deep-fat fryer that registers a heat of 130C/250F for about five minutes. These are then removed and allowed to cool again. The last frying must be at a temperature of 180C/350F, as they cook to a delicious golden brown.

This all sounds a bit of a fuss for a humble plate of chips but, be assured, if you have the time and patience the result is worth the effort. By allowing the chip to cool right down between each stage of the cooking process much of the moisture inside the potato is removed and doesn't escape from the chip as steam while they are in the oil and so create a soggy interior.

There's some dispute as to which country produced the first plate of chips - not to be mistaken for French fries, which are slimmer - but it's generally accepted that the British make the best fish and chips and that we were the first to combine deep-fried fish with chips.

The first recorded fish and chip shop was owned by Joseph Malin, from London, who opened it in the early 1860s, though a Mr Lees, from Mossley, Lancashire, is thought to have pioneered the concept of serving fish and chips together about the same time.

The rapid growth in fish and chip shops owes much to the development of trawl fishing in the North Sea during the second half of the 19th century and the development of the railways which meant fish could be transported inland quickly.

Apparently, a quarter of all meals eaten out still come from traditional fish and chip shops, which mostly buy their potatoes in ready-peeled and then cut them into chips on the premises. Unfortunately most restaurants, institutions, school canteens and other food service industries buy in frozen chips, a million tonnes of which come from Belgium and the Netherlands. We buy at least 870,000 tonnes of ready-prepared chips from the supermarkets.

Out of the fresh potatoes sold, it is thought that 20 per cent are turned into chips by home cooks. For those who enjoy statistics, the British Potato Council says that we grow five and a half million tonnes of potatoes in the UK, which can be equated to enough potatoes to fill 130,000 football pitches.

New potatoes are already in the shops, many of which come from Cornwall. This means that many of us will switch our allegiance from chips to new potatoes flavoured with mint and smothered with butter.

For those who intend to carry on eating chips during the new potato season, chips will remain firmly on the menu. Swiss officials for the Euro 2008 football tournament were so concerned that they wouldn't have enough potatoes to satisfy the fans' demand for chips, they have allowed an extra 5,000 tonnes of potatoes to be imported.