This month: Fish and chips
This one I'm claiming for the Jews. You might think it wiser to attempt to claim, say, Jewish food in Britain for the Jews rather than fish and chips, but I'm nothing if not ambitious.
In any case I have impeccable sources on my side. In her monumental Encyclopedia of Jewish Food, published in 1997, the great Claudia Roden credits Portuguese Marranos - Jews who had been forced to hide their ethnicity due to persecution - for introducing fried fish to this country when they arrived as refugees in the sixteenth century. The soon-to-be US president Thomas Jefferson wrote about eating 'fried fish in the Jewish fashion' after a visit to Britain towards the end of the eighteenth century and the first Jewish cookbook, published here in 1846, included a recipe for it.
In 1860 a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe called Joseph Malin opened the first business in London's East End selling fried fish alongside chipped potatoes which, until then, had been found only in the Irish potato shops. In 1968 the National Federation of Fish Fryers even presented a commemorative plaque to Malin's of Bow, recognising their founding role in the chippie business. According to Roden, nobody has challenged her version.'
Well there was one person,' she says, 'but they didn't have an alternative suggestion. They just didn't like the historical record.' (Of which my family is a part; my own Great Uncle Lou was famous for his chippie on the Mile End Road.) Even John Walton won't challenge her version. Walton, professor of social history at the university of Central Lancashire, is the author of Fish and Chips and the British Working Classes 1870-1940. He's the experts' expert, though he admits he fell into it by chance; he claimed to his students that anything could be the subject of academic study and, to prove it, said he would write a paper on the history of the chippie. He ended up becoming a little more interested in the subject than is strictly necessary. As well as the East End Jewish tradition there was, he says, 'a Lancashire chips tradition growing out of the regional baked potato business, onto which fried fish got grafted'.
But it was the mighty industrial revolution that really fostered the business. 'The arrival of steam for the fleets and the development of icing equipment produced a massive expansion in supplies of cheaper forms of sea fish.' At the same time the working classes saw a general rise in their incomes which left a little spare cash for luxuries like the fish supper.
The result was growth. By 1910 there were around 25,000 fish and chips shops in Britain. By 1927, the peak, that number had risen to 35,000 and up to two-thirds of the white fish being landed on these shores was ending up in the deep fat fryer. To put this in perspective today there are still 8,600 fish and chips shops in this country; in the 1920s and 1930s, therefore, they were four times as numerous.
'In the early part of the twentieth century, there was even an official medical and social literature denigrating fish and chips as a terrible diet,' Walton says.'It was on the basis that the working classes did not know what was good for them so that, if they liked something, it had to be bad.' The reverse was, for the most part, true: eaten in moderation fish and chips provided a ready supply of protein, vitamins and carbohydrates.
It was not, however, a homogeneous business - at least where the choice of fish was concerned. In Yorkshire it had to be haddock. Lancashire preferred hake and the North East went for dogfish, or the euphemistic 'rock salmon'. Whatever the choice, the importance of the dish was always officially acknowledged and through two World Wars the British Government bent over backwards to keep fish and chips off the ration card and supplies strong. The damage to morale if they had failed to do so was considered unthinkable.
The story of fish and chips since World War Two is, as Walton puts it 'one of remarkable robustness and resilience in the face of rising fish prices'. There are also the challenges from increasingly popular ethnic takeaways like Indian and Chinese. And yet fish and chips endures, partly because of the willingness of waves of those immigrants to add the core of the business to their own. The 'Chinese chippie' is now at the heart of the trade. We may have come a long way since the immigrant Joseph Malin first spotted an opening in the market but, in some ways,very little has changed.
· The lowdown
Number of fish and chip shops in Britain ...8,600
Meals sold last year ...250 million
Fish popularity league table...
Cod 61.5%
Haddock 25%
Whiting 6%
Most portions of fish and chips sold in a day from one shop...4,000
50% of us eat fish and chips once a month
14% eat fish and chips once a week
The Harry Ramsden chain, first established in Guiseley,West Yorkshire in 1928, and now owned by Compass, uses 10 million pounds of potatoes a year.They also get through: 2.5 million pounds of fish, 46,000lb salt,and 16,000 bottles of vinegar. Jeffrey Archer, Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Jimmy Saville have all eaten there.
Five to try
Brownsover Fish Bar
124 Hollowell Way, Brownsover Estate, Rugby, Warwickshire
(current holder of fish and chip shop of the year award)
The Galleon
34 Colwyn Avenue, Rhos-on-Sea, Colwyn Bay, Wales
Pages Fisheries
30-32 Leyland Road, Ferry Fryston, Castleford
Seniors Fish Bar
106 Normoss Road, Poulton-Le-Fylde, Blackpool
Olley's
67-69 Norwood Road, London SE24