Fish and chips

Sitting on a Dutch terrace at De Markt in Sittard with my son this summer, I decided to have lunch like an English tourist: fish and chips. I hungered for the advertised frietjes met een lekkerbek, the Dutch version of the English national dish. Perhaps my expectations were too high, but the result was somewhat disappointing. It was a tasteless affair. Nothing like the fish and chips I'd recently treated myself to at The Flask in Highgate.

This is striking, because historian Margo Lestz recently wrote an article claiming that the origin of British "chips" can be traced to the banks of the Meuse River, not in the Netherlands, but further downstream in Belgium. People living along the Meuse caught small fish and fried them as a tasty addition to their meals. When the river froze over during a particularly cold winter, a housewife decided to creatively "make" her own fish.

She was scouring the kitchen for dinner ideas, as Lestz recounts in British Food, but found only potatoes. As she glanced back and forth between the potatoes and her frying pan, an idea struck her. If she cut the potatoes into strips about the width of those little fish, her husband and children might not even notice the difference. So she did, and voilà! Chips were born.

The secret was soon out, and chips became a fish substitute in many households. The chip shop arrived in London via Huguenot refugees. A hundred years earlier, Sephardic Jews fleeing the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal had already introduced floured and fried fish: "fish, the Jewish way." By 1860, both fried fish and fried chips were sold on London streets.

The idea to combine them came from thirteen-year-old Joseph Malin. His family lived in East London and were descended from those early Sephardic Jewish immigrants. They were carpet weavers who also sold chips from their home. Little Joseph must have been eating a piece of fried fish from a nearby shop when he popped one of his mother's chips into his mouth. He liked the combination and thought they would sell well together, so the story goes.

For Londoners, it was love at first sight. After initially selling fish and chips from a tray on the street, he opened a shop on Cleveland Street, Fitzrovia. It became a favourite meal for the working classes. Traditionally, fish and chips—haddock and pea puree in the north, cod and peas in the south—were wrapped in newspaper, but unfortunately, that's no longer done. The ink is considered bad for public health.

In 1910, there were 25,000 chippies, including one on Salmon Street, Limehouse, run by William Hitchcock, Alfred Hitchcock’s father. He also had a fishmonger's across the street as was common (the fries hide the taste of old fish). Today, there are only ten thousand chippies left. Some have quirky names. In Greenwich, for example, there's one with the playful name "Jack the Chipper." Hitchcockian humour.