A Portion Of Chips

The perfect accompaniment to a piece of fried fish is a portion of chips, slices of potato that have been fried in oil. The potato did not come to Europe until some time in the 16th century, one of the strange but delicious vegetables that were found by the Spanish when they conquered Peru. By 1660, according to Robert May’s The Accomplished Cook, Britons were eating “potato’s boil’d and fried in butter”.

The Belgians, though, claim to be the inventors of the chip. In 1680, so the story goes, the winter weather was so cold that the River Meuse froze over. The women of the area began cutting potatoes into the shape of fish and frying them in oil to provide a source of nourishment for their families. Quite when this delicacy came over to England is uncertain but Charles Dickens, in A Tale of Two Cities (1859), makes reference to “husky chips of potato fried with some reluctant drops of oil”.

From the mid-19th century chips were firmly part of the British diet and a number of northern towns and city vie for the honour of being the first to fry potatoes. A blue plaque in Oldham’s Tommyfield Market claims to be the birthplace of the British chips.

A local entrepreneur, John Lees, is said to have been the first to sell fish and chips around 1863 from a wooden hut in the market in Mossley, near Manchester, a northern rival to the claims of Joseph Malin. What is more likely is that several outlets began to trade across the country around that time and because no one was certain at the time that it was going to become popular, the identity of the originator is lost in the mists of time.

Curiously, fish and chips were one of the few staple food products that were not rationed during the Second World War, further cementing their popularity. It would be a shame if economic conditions could achieve what war could not and destroy their popularity.