The most British meal imaginable — hot fried fish and chips, wrapped in paper, doused in vinegar and eaten on a windswept promenade — is, on closer inspection, not very British at all. The fish came to Britain with Jewish immigrants. The chip may have been born in Belgium or France. And the moment the two were first married on the same plate is claimed by two towns at opposite ends of England, neither able to prove it. The national dish is a monument to how quickly a country can adopt a foreign idea and forget it was ever foreign.
Fried in the Jewish fashion
The fish half of the story is the better documented. Sephardic Jews, many of Portuguese and Spanish descent, settled in England from the seventeenth century onward, bringing with them a way of frying fish in a flour batter — pescado frito — that could be prepared in advance and eaten cold on the Sabbath, when cooking was forbidden. This battered fish, sold from stalls and warehouses, became a familiar sight in poorer districts of London well before the chip arrived. Charles Dickens, an unfailing chronicler of the London street, mentions a "fried fish warehouse" in Oliver Twist, published in 1838, decades before anyone was pairing the fish with potatoes. Even Thomas Jefferson is recorded as having eaten fish "fried in the Jewish fashion" in England. The fried fish, in other words, had a life of its own long before chips.
The disputed chip
The chip's origins are murkier and fiercely contested. Belgium claims the fried potato as a national invention, with a tradition that villagers along the River Meuse fried small potatoes as a substitute for the small fish they could not catch when the river froze. France's claim rests on the pommes frites sold by street vendors in Paris — the term "French fries" preserves it. In Britain, the chip is often said to have appeared in the industrial north, in Lancashire and Yorkshire, in the middle of the nineteenth century, feeding mill and factory workers with cheap fried carbohydrate. What is certain is that once cheap potatoes and cheap frying fat met the hungry populations of the industrial towns, the fried chip spread fast.
Who married them first?
The union of the two is claimed by two rival birthplaces. In London's East End, a young Jewish immigrant named Joseph Malin is traditionally credited with opening a shop selling fried fish and chips together in the early 1860s. In the north, John Lees is said to have been selling fish and chips from a wooden hut in the market at Mossley, near Oldham in Lancashire, at around the same time. There is no surviving document to settle the contest decisively, and both towns cling to the honour. What matters is that the combination proved irresistible: hot, filling, cheap and portable, it was the perfect food for a newly urban, industrial working class with money for a treat but no time to cook.
By the closing decades of the nineteenth century the "chippy" had become a fixture of British life. The number of fish and chip shops grew to the tens of thousands, reaching a peak in the years around and after the First World War, when there were reportedly some thirty-five thousand of them across the country — far more than exist today. The trade depended on two industrial developments: the steam trawler, which brought vast quantities of cheap fish from distant waters such as the North Sea and Iceland to inland cities by rail, and the spread of cheap frying fat.
Fish and chips earned its place in the national mythology during the world wars. The government considered it so important to public morale and nutrition that, remarkably, it was one of the very few foods never rationed during the Second World War, even as almost everything else was strictly controlled. Winston Churchill is said to have called the fish and chips pairing "the good companions," and the meal became a small, reliable comfort in dark years. Fish and chips fed shift workers, seaside daytrippers and troops on leave alike, and it did so without regard to class — one of the few pleasures shared across the whole of British society.
The traditional newspaper wrapping, long part of the ritual, was eventually phased out on hygiene grounds in the later twentieth century, printer's ink being judged unfit for contact with food; greaseproof paper and cardboard took its place. Vinegar, salt, and in the north a scoop of mushy peas, remain the classic accompaniments, though regional loyalties run deep and are argued over with religious intensity.
The dish endures as a symbol of Britishness precisely because its foreign roots have been so completely absorbed. A meal assembled from a Jewish frying technique and a potato of contested continental parentage became, within a couple of generations, the thing the British reach for when they want to taste home. There is no better emblem of how a national cuisine is really built: not from ancient purity, but from borrowing, adapting, and forgetting where the good ideas came from.
Quiz nuggets
- Battered fried fish was brought to Britain by Sephardic Jewish immigrants; Dickens mentions a "fried fish warehouse" in Oliver Twist (1838).
- The origin of the chip is disputed between Belgium, France and the industrial north of England.
- Joseph Malin in London's East End and John Lees in Mossley, Lancashire, both claim to have first sold fish and chips together, around the 1860s.
- The number of British fish and chip shops peaked at roughly 35,000 in the early twentieth century.
- Fish and chips was one of the few foods never rationed in Britain during the Second World War.