The Importance of Fish and Chips

‘It’s all in the oil’, said the man from Seahouses.

The further north I travel, the more I have come to realise that my principal currency has become fish and chips. For that is how I often pay people for their many kindnesses and also how I reward myself for hard days.

Contrary to what most of us are brought up to believe, fish and chips are about as British as paella or sushi. The ‘fish’ element is supposed to have been imported by Sephardic Jews in the late seventeenth century, who used the preserving qualities of the batter to cook their fish on a Friday night, and then to consume it on the Saturday, so as not to break religious laws that commanded them to cook nothing on the Sabbath. Right back in the late 1700s, a cookbook refers to ‘the Jews’ way of preserving all sorts of fish’. The origins of the ‘chip’ part are not quite so clear, but almost certainly the idea was brought to England by Dutch or Belgian immigrants, only to find itself married up to the fish in due course. Whatever the origins, by the early 1900s, there were around 25,000 fish and chip shops in Britain[1], and an industry that was thought so important to national morale that it was protected from rationing in both world wars. Since then, the humble ‘chippy’, with its dodgy health benefits, has survived just about every national food fad and fashion.

I know exactly where the habit came from in my own case. At the age when my friends and I were drinking underage in any local pub that would serve us, fish and chips came as a daring rebuke to home-cooked food and unaffordable steak, a tiny act of rebellion against our privileged diet. We would start each evening out at the Tasty Plaice in Petworth, the 850 cc engine of the Mini revving on the double yellow lines outside, with cod and chips served with salt and vinegar, whether you asked for it or not, and wrapped in half of yesterday’s copy of the Daily Express. Occasionally one of us would break ranks and buy a battered sausage with curry sauce, but we were all still far too self-consciously middle-class to order mushy peas. Mushy peas were, like lager tops and Coronation Street, beyond the pale.

For obvious reasons, to me at least, fish and chips started to make more sense when they were within sight and sound of the sea than they did thirty miles inland so, for many years, I dropped the habit. These days, even if the fish was caught a thousand miles away, I find I can mentally reduce the food miles involved to the yardage between the fishing boat down there in the harbour and my tummy, even though the boat is full of lobster creels and has never so much as landed a single haddock. The dish is a coastal delight.

I am wary of culinary generalisations, as a rule, so it may just have been serendipity that every fish meal I have had north of the River Humber has been finer than any I enjoyed to its south. From Withernsea to Lindisfarne, they have just got better and better, offering new glimpses of sophistication and reigniting in me a taste that I had lost more than three decades before. It seems that the less the particular town has to prove about its tough maritime heritage, the better its carry-outs. On one particular day, I have haddock and chips in Filey for lunch, and then cod and chips in Scarborough for my dinner, and even then I will be ready for more in Whitby a couple of nights later. I am not proud of this gluttony as, to have committed it, is to have consumed far more than my fair share of the ocean’s bounty, but in time I will make it right.

Some days I will be in a cod mood, some days haddock. Haddock, with its stronger flavours, is for harbour-side bus shelters on rainy nights, waterproofs and phone calls home. Cod, tender and succulent, is for the end of the pier, feet dangling reflectively over the edge and herring gulls swirling around in the reddening sky above. However much tartare sauce I am given, it is never enough and, sadly, mushy peas are still off my personal menu. In Hornsea, the lady serving me simply cannot believe I mean that I don’t want peas and serves me a double portion anyway.

Then suddenly, a few short months after I had rediscovered this peerless part of our national food heritage, I walk away again. One last, gorgeous and memorable portion of haddock in Seahouses, almost within sight of the Scottish border, and I know that I have come to the end of that road of delight. The time is right and there will be more another day.

Delights have been relatively few and far between in recent days, so the fish and chips have become much more to me than just a quick meal. Which is how delight works.

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[1] These days, there are still 10,500 fish and chip shops in the UK, turning over £1.2 billion a year and using up more than 10% of the entire domestic potato crop and 30% of its white fish. To settle any arguments that may be brewing, cod outsells haddock by a factor of around two to one. (National Federation of Fish Friers)