20 December: Fish and Chips

On this date in 1928 Harry Ramsden opened his fish and chip restaurant. Here are 10 things you might not know about fish and chips:

1. It’s seen today as a quintessentially British dish, but originally, fried fish in batter may actually have been imported to Britain by Jewish immigrants from The Netherlands. It’s not known for sure who first paired this with chips. The first fish and chip shops appeared in 1860. A Jewish immigrant named Joseph Malin opened the first recorded combined fish-and-chip shop in London that year, while John Lees did the same in Manchester. We can’t be sure other places hadn’t made the connection too, but didn’t write anything down.
2. Brits spend £1.2 billion on fish and chips every year, which is about 382 million portions. One in six UK adults enjoys fish and chips once or twice a week. On Fridays, one in five takeaways consumed in the UK are fish and chips. Why Friday? This originates from the Catholic tradition of not eating meat on Fridays.
3. There are currently approximately 10,500 specialist fish and chip shops in the UK. The oldest of them is in a town called Yeadon, near Leeds, which has been serving fish and chips since 1865. It is called, appropriately enough, ‘The Oldest Fish & Chip Shop in the World’.
4. As a boy, film director Alfred Hitchcock lived above a fish and chip shop in London. It was the family business.
5. Fish and chips played a part in the British war effort during WWII. Winston Churchill called fish and chips ‘good companions’, and refused to ration them, because doing so, he believed, would have a devastating effect on morale. Not only that, but during the D-Day Landings British soldiers identified each other by crying out ‘fish’. If the response was ‘chips’ you knew the other person was on your side.
6. Fish and chips was traditionally served in Newspaper – a cheap form of packaging. The health and safety people put a stop to that in the 1980s because they ruled that newspaper ink wasn’t safe to eat. Now fish and chips are wrapped in greaseproof paper.
7. Charles Dickens wrote about fish and chips. As early as 1838 he mentioned fried fish warehouses in Oliver Twist. These were the forerunners of the fish and chip shop. Later, in A Tale of Two Cities, he mentioned actual fish and chips - 'Husky chips of potatoes, fried with some reluctant drops of oil'. He’s not the only writer to mention them. George Orwell did, too. In The Road to Wigan Pier, he describes fish and chips as 'home comforts' which acted as a panacea to the working classes.
8. You might not think that fish and chips is a very healthy thing to eat, but my research found several mentions of how favourably it compares with other types of takeaway such as a curry or McDonalds. To be fair, one of these was the website of a fish and chip shop! The British Nutrition Foundation says an average portion of fish and chips contains 20.6g of fat. An average portion of fish, chips and Peas contains 7.3% fat. A pork pie has 10.8%. Chips contain fibre (more than double the fibre found in an average serving of brown Rice or bowl of Porridge, according to the fish and chip shop) and a third of your daily requirement of Vitamin C. Add mushy peas and you get even more vitamins.
9. At time of writing, the record for the world’s largest portion of fish and chips is held by Fish & Chips at London Road in Enfield, London, who set the record in July 2012. It was a portion of Halibut and chips which weighed in at 47kg.
10. What happens to all the fat used to fry it in? In the UK, waste frying fat is a vital source of bio diesel.

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