My friend reminds me of the episode in James Herriot’s Every Living Thing. Puppy, the “enormous shaggy creature of doubtful ancestry and with a short temper”, belongs to Mrs Bartram who runs the local fish and chips shop.
Herriot is trying unsuccessfully to anaesthetise Puppy before a minor surgery, but the dog refuses to take the medicine that will knock him out. Finally, (as Puppy loves fish and chips), Herriot hides the tablet in a chip and Puppy devours it and drifts away! All is well that ends well.
For the first time, says Herriot, he wrote out a prescription that said, “Tablets for dog. One to be given three times daily inserted in chips.”
But all English do not necessarily love fish and chips, I learn. “I, personally, am not a lover of fish,” responds my English friend Velda Dounias, when I ask her what she has to say about the iconic English fare. But she says, “In the north of England where I come from, this food was part of the culture, so to speak. Friday night was fish and chips night, and the chips were always cooked in beef dripping. Not so now, as it is vegetable oil that is mainly used. We always ate it out of newspaper, which seemed to make the food taste better. It was normally doused in salt and vinegar. Various fish were used, cod and hake mainly, as I remember.”
Though Dounias has cooked fish and chips at home, it does not taste the same as what you get at the shop, she says. So, if at all she has to eat it, it would be cod and chips from a ‘proper’ fish and chips shop. Her step-brother was once a skipper of a north sea trawler and would fish in the Atlantic for cod that was supplied to various fish and chips shops.
Closer home, a friend swears by the fish and chips served at The Only Place on Museum Road, Bengaluru, and Indigo Deli and The Irish House in Mumbai. She says fish and chips in India were great, but ever since the ‘useless and tasteless basa’ made its way into Indian restaurants, it has spoiled everything.
The poor basa then gets a drubbing on my WhatsApp group. It is called “Tasteless, miserable, cheap and bland,” and, for good measure, another friend declares, “It is a fish self-respecting Bongs will avoid!”
The tilapia also gets bad press from the girls. Evidently, the pheesh phry is but a legacy of the colonial fish and chips. “I think it is the great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria’s fish and chips. And the bawarchis of the sahibs learnt from the memsahibs to dip/smear fish fillet in batter, crumb and then fry it.” Most of my friends prefer to use lemon instead of the traditional vinegar, and almost all of them turn up their noses at the thought of having it wrapped in newspaper. They like to have it with mustard sauce and bhetki seems to be the preferred fish.
Fish and chips is supposed to have made its presence felt in the UK in 1863 and rapidly became a popular meal, especially among the masses. It finds mention in George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier as chief among the “home comforts” of the working classes. So essential was it considered that, even during World War II, fish and chips were exempt from rationing. Winston Churchill called fish and chips as “Good Companions”!
There are nearly 10,500 fish and chips shops across the UK today. Britons eat nearly 382 million portions of fish and chips every year, not including Puppy.
How to make Fish and Chips
Recipe courtesy Velda Dounias
There is no substitute for fresh fish. And, I believe there is an art to getting the batter just right. Some places that sell the fish have soggy batter. But it should be crisp with lovely white fish inside.
Ingredients
Self-raising flour
Soda water
Salt
Pepper
Method
Mix flour with liquid to make a batter that is not too thick or too runny, just enough to coat the back of a spoon.
Coat the fish in a little seasoned flour and then with the batter. This needs to be cooked in very hot oil initially, to crisp the batter. Then turn the heat down to ensure the fish is cooked through, depending on its thickness.
Chips: Good quality potatoes make a huge difference to the taste and look. The cut potatoes should be added to hot oil, after which the heat should be reduced. Then, just before taking the chips out, increase the heat to crisp the potatoes slightly. Chips from the shop are crisp on the outside but fluffy inside.
Salt, pepper and vinegar or lemon is the traditional seasoning.
In this fortnightly column, we discuss an iconic food, its origins and evolution
