Fish and chips: a historical view

I love fish and chips.  Every time I travel to the UK, which is fairly often, I make a point of having fish and chips at least once.  You wouldn’t think I’d get so worked up about a piece of flaky white fish deep fried served with oversized french fries and a glop of mushy peas, but I really can’t help myself. I like mine with malt vinegar (not tartar sauce) and accompanied by a decent pale ale, but I’ll take it however it comes.  I have even traveled more than an hour on a bus from St. Andrews in Scotland to Anstruther (pronounced en-ster, believe it or not) as a pilgrimage to taste the world’s best fish and chips.

With all the plates of fish and chips I’ve eaten over the years, though, I’d never given a thought as to the origins of the dish. I just seemed like one of those things that has always been “there”.  Three books I’ve read recently, however, suggest otherwise.

Dan Jurafsky’s The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu might be the most unusual of the bunch.  Jurafsky is a linguist who takes up several iconic foods and examines them using linguistic and historically analytic methods. William Sitwell provides a series of witty, if sometimes snarky essays to accompany his A History of Food in 100 Recipes, a book that eminently lives up to its title. Finally there is Rachel Laudan’s Cuisine and Empire, one of my favorite books on food.  Laudan looks at several world cuisines and how they developed from their nomadic, religious, and political roots.

We can start in the 2nd century BCE with Jurafsky and the court of the Persian Sassanid emperor Khosrau. Contemporary sources cite a dish named sikbāj, loosely translated as a meat and vinegar stew.  Over the next several centuries, meat cooked with vinegar moved westward across the Mediterranean, with meat being replaced by fish in Catholic Italy, France, and Spain and the word sikbāj evolving into escabeche and ceviche – terms that are familiar to aficionados of the Spanish/Mexican/Caribbean habit of “cooking” fish in an acid without using heat. Curiously, though, in Italy, northern Spain, and Portugal the fish was often fried before combined with the vinegar.  A 16th century cookbook defines sikbāj as a piece of fish fried in egg batter and eaten cold with vinegar and oil.  The Portuguese version, pescado frito, wound up in Japan through the Portuguese trade routes as tempura.

About the same time, Jews were expelled from Spain and Portugal.  Many migrated to England, bringing their cuisine with them and one of the dishes was fried fish served cold with vinegar.  An English cookbook from 1792 describes this type of preparation as “The Jews Way of preserving salmon and all sorts of fish.” By this time potatoes cooked in fat were beginning to appear in London, probably originating in Ireland or the north of England. In the 1860s, Joseph Malin began selling combining fried potatoes with Jewish friend fish (served warm) in the first recognized fish and chip shop.  That was only 150 years ago.

So far, we have the story of the birth of fish and chips.  To see what happens next, we turn to Laudan and Sitwell but to get there, we need to briefly look at the context.  For centuries, Britain was, like other European economies, primarily agrarian.  And, like other agrarian economies, the most people received whatever nourishment they got from pottage, a generic term for stuff boiled in a pot of water.  In most cases, it was usually some type of grain with perhaps cabbage, onions, or other root vegetables added.  In good times, meat or fish scraps or other vegetables might be added, in bad times, there was a lot of water in that pot.

In the 18th century, technological change began what would become the Industrial Revolution and the expansion of the British empire greatly expanded the financial and mercantile activity in London.  This led to a massive shift in population from the country to the cities (and the creation of new cities in the midlands and northern England) and an increase in population apart from migration. The method of feeding all those people, however, didn’t fundamentally change and this led to a crisis by the late 19th century.  Attempts to recruit soldiers for the Boer War (1899-1902) were severely hampered by the poor nutrition of working class men and a Parliament committee on “Physical Deterioration” estimated in 1904 that one-third of all working class children were malnourished.

Against this backdrop were 25,000 fish and chip shops (called “chippies”) operating at the dawn of the First World War.  Not too long after, estimates are that half of all the fish caught in British waters were sold by chippies. That’s a long way from Joseph Malin’s shop in the Jewish section of London. The format of fish and chips was spread by immigrants, largely Italian, who spread out from London to cities like Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow, and Liverpool who provided a cheap source of protein for the working class. Fish and chips, typically wrapped in newsprint, didn’t require kitchens or dining rooms, so single men and women who worked (and there were lots of women who worked at this time) could get something hot to eat when they wanted to/need to.

The growth of chippies echoes a general growth in street food as a way of feeding this new urban population.  We’re talking about fish and chips here, but how different in concept is it from hot dogs, or kibbe and falafel (Middle East), sate (southeast Asia), tempura (Japan), tacos (Mexico), samosas and bhaji (India) or any other of the street foods available today. In all cases, a vendor is able to make a living by using equipment not generally available for the home cook (grill, deep fryer) to make simple, basic food that provides basic nutrition for people who don’t have the resources.  And while we might not consider fried fish and potatoes to be all that nutritious, I think I’d pick it over a bowl of gruel with cabbage and onions.

There are a couple of loose ends with this story, both of which come from Sitwell’s book. The first is Sitwell’s source.  Sitwell’s book is a series of essays that develop from 100 recipes that stretch from the 19th century BCE to 2011.  His recipe #58 is taken from The Fish Frier and His Trade, a collection of articles initially published in 1902 by one William Loftus.  Loftus wrote under the pen name of “Chatchip” for the Fish Trades Gazette, a trade journal for the fish and chips industry.  This tome not only included the recipe for peas included by Sitwell, but also instructions on how to start and maintain a shop. Think about that for a minute – less than 40 years from the time that Joseph Morin opened the first known fish and chip shop there was a full-blown trade association with a trade journal.

You can still buy a copy of The Fish Frier and His Trade for $95 on Ebay, but I suspect that the licensing, legal, health, and taxation requirements are a wee bit different today than in 1902.

The other loose end concerns the British government’s response to malnutrition from this late 19th-early 20th century period. I’m going to have to spend some more time digging into this, but a couple of the other recipes used by Sitwell during periods of food rationing in the UK suggest that the UK government was concerned in determining how to maintain a sufficient base of nutrition to keep the workforce productive. There’s also extensive discussion in Lizzie Collingham’s The Taste of War about the UK’s efforts at maintaining adequate food supplies in the UK while also trying to control the flow of food into Germany as a deliberate strategy.  In other words, it’s clear that the UK government has been actively looking at food and nutrition as an element of public policy as early as the the late 19th century.  So immediately I ask myself, how does that work and who else is doing it?  A subject for further research.