It's funny, isn't it? These days you can get foodies to admit to crunching ortolans under a tea-towel, whipping up ice cream with liquid nitrogen, eating raw fish and game hung so long even the botulism has left for a less toxic environment, yet mention deep-fat frying and they quail in terror. "It's so dangerous".

Question further and you'll hear a half-hour of random gibbering, ranging freely from exploding kitchen napalm to lumps of dripping the size of golf-balls coming adrift in your aorta - and under it all, of course, in true foodie style, the queasily lurking subtext that having chip shop equipment on your Bulthaup worktop is - well, a bit common.

I can say this with some impunity because I felt it so keenly myself. I remembered with shame and terror, my nan's chip pot: the bottom of an old pressure cooker with a drop-in wire basket, allowed to congeal after each daily use into a toxic slab of chip-tainted ambergris and recharged religiously with 6lbs of fresh slab lard once a year, whether it needed it or not.

I remember the pot, the ambrosial chips it produced and the day it went up in flames. There was always that danger with chips pots. My father, an insurance investigator by trade, came home every other evening from 1968 to 1980 shaking his head in wonderment at another poor sod who'd overfilled the pot, then put water on it when it went up - an effect not unlike chucking on a couple of mugs of unleaded.

Then, last week, because I was having friends to dinner - in a way that would probably have made Nan's toes righteously curl - and because I simply had to have freshly-made crab brik as a starter - I borrowed a deep-fat fryer from a friend.

Reader, I am besotted.

This is not one of those fancy jobs - all oil reservoirs, self-cleaning filterpads and a huge solid lid to prevent the filthy smell of chip-oil revealing your social position to patrolling neighbours - no it's just a quarter-size hotel pan with something like a kettle element in the bottom. It has a 'temperature' dial on the top that, according to my probe thermometer, has the same relationship with truth as a banker, but it cooks like a dream.

Like many middle-class parents, I'd yielded to infant demands for chips but salved my conscience with the oven variety - even, God forgive me, going so far in my guilt-driven madness as to purchase a premium German organic version. Because they were baked in the oven, I reasoned, they were not fried and therefore not mired in original sin. I'd never considered that the only thing that can make an oven-cooked chip taste as delicious as a proper one is fat. (The giveaway with oven chips is how fast going cold makes them inedible. Oh yes, all that lovely encapsulated mouth-feel is released by heat, but the minute they go cool on the plate, it reverts to a congealed mess of vegetable shortening and refined starch).

The silly thing is, I'm not sure I can remember how long it is since I had a proper chip. Chefs never seem to get it right, messing with thickness or leaving the skin on for those ridiculous wedge shapes. (Think about it, guys. If a chip is a divine combination of steamed potato inside a caramelised and Maillard-enhanced exterior, then the ratio of one to the other is key. A chip is half-an-inch square in section and skinless or you're messing with the order of things). Most restaurants are buying them pre-cut or reconstituted -
hell even my local chippie is getting them in pre-made and blanched.

The last time I ate a chip, cut by hand from a real potato and double-cooked in hot oil was probably in a small terraced house in Bristol in 1970 (to complete the picture: with corned beef, tinned peas and watching Thunderbirds in my Man From Uncle jammies).

I've been obsessively running tests, weighing individual test chips before and after frying, rolling them on sheets of pristine blotting paper, messing with oil temperatures, double and triple frying and I swear to God these things come out less fatty than the oven jobs. If I steamed new potatoes and added a spoonful of cold-pressed rapeseed oil as a dressing I'd be taking in more unhealthy fat than a big old bowl of chips - and oh, with infinitely less joy.

My only concession to my previous pusillanimity is that I still keep a fire blanket on the kitchen wall.

I can't believe I've gone so long without one of these things in my life. I've been a benighted fool. How can I have become convinced that a vital kitchen process is dangerous to life and health, smelly and social suicide? As an ex-adman that combination of evils makes me at the very least suspicious.

So tell me. Am I wrong? Is the deep-fat fryer really Beelzebub's kitchen appliance? Will it kill my whole family by arterial congestion or conflagration? Will a faint redolence of hot oil turn us into social pariahs? Or has the whole demonisation of this useful and benign tool been a plot cooked up by the manufacturers of filthy oven chips?