Can UK's beloved fish and chips survive rising costs and closures?
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Freshly cooked, piping hot fish and chips, sprinkled with salt and soused with vinegar, wrapped in paper and eaten out-of-doors on a cold and wintry day. Could there be anything more quintessentially British than fish and chips? The British love what Winston Churchill called “the good companions".
I have eaten the UK’s “national dish" in multiple places, including in the Scottish highlands, in a Welsh seaside village, a fancy restaurant in London, a costal pub in Clovelly, and a tiny chippy in Devon. Fish and chips is to the British what vada-pav is to Mumbai–a quick-fix, no-nonsense meal, tasty on the tongue and easy on the pocket. The origins date to Jewish immigrants (for the fried fish), and Belgian and French influences (for the deep-fried potatoes).
Both were enjoyed separately well before they came together. Food historian Annie Gray says the potato slowly went from knobbly curiosity to staple food - especially for the poor – and chips made an appearance, given how well it lent itself to deep frying. By the Victorian era, chipped potatoes were everywhere.
Dickens famously described them in his 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities as “husky chips of potatoes fried with some reluctant drops of oil". The proximity to the coast meant fried fish was on the table of the rich and the poor. Gray says the first fish and chip shop appeared in the UK in about 1860.
“Sephardic Jews sold cold fried fish, intended for eating on the Sabbath. It was cheap, filling and tasty, and fried fish stalls sprung up in cities. It was inevitable that these two street foods, so popular with the masses, would end up together," she shares.
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