I’m sorry, if you don’t know the movie I’m quoting then I need you to move to the back of the line. Rent A Fish Called Wanda on your way back there. Fish-n-chips are the most famous culinary duo since salt and pepper, more cutting edge than bangers and mash, and more sought after than red beans and rice. Fish-n-Chips don’t even need to use the ‘and’ to bind them; they’re so together they are almost one word. Fish-, deep fried with a coating or a batter, n-chips, flavorful, gloriously golden brown, crispy, dipped in salt, vinegar or ketchup. The condiments may change but the standard stays the same, fish-n-chips, originally a working man’s supper, it became a treat after the beach or a hit of grease to ward off the working week.
Fried fish came to England with the Sephardic Jews in the 17th century as Pescado Frito. It adopted the name fried fish, usually plaice, and became popular street food in London in the 1850s. Luckily, ice cream debuted on the street the same year so you could have a piece of plaice and a scoop of plain ice cream as the newly happening lunchtime treat. However, Fish and Ice Cream couldn’t draw the crowds and never became a solid duet. Ice cream definitely found its own career as a solo act and soon fried fish began looking for a new dance partner. Up north in Scotland, deep fried ‘chipped’ potatoes were becoming popular. Though no one has yet discerned when ‘fish’ met ‘chips’, Joseph Marin celebrated their commercial debut with the first fish and chip shop serving the pair together in newsprint in London in 1860.
Fish-n-chips toured New Zealand soon after and was a regular on the hotel lunch counters and in dining rooms by 1870. Kiwis never called it the ‘chipper’ like they did at Home, but always the ‘fish-n-chip shop’ or, incongruously, a restaurant, thus ensuring that a variety of seafood would be available in such places. Fried clams, oysters, prawns, if it stood still long enough it ended up in the deep fat fryer. But not like the Scottish, with their deep fried haggis or their deep fried mars bars. Oceanic produce only, please, perhaps bending slightly to include a fritter of pineapple or banana. But, always, always, always served with a serving of chips.
I have never loved the potato. Those who do are awfully sensitive about chips. The times, moods and accoutrements that can accompany wedges, shoestrings, skinny, curly, krinkle (note the ‘k’), chunky — as many types as the Eskimos recognize for snow — the potato fried has many hats. But when I say ‘Fish-n-chips’, this conjures its own particular type of fry: the fresh cut chip.
Oh New Zealand! We love your fish. Exotic names like Tarakihi, Guernard, Hoki, Snapper. New Zealand your fish delights but your chips! Your chips cause no end of grief. Frozen. Frozen! Nothing good comes out of frozen. Ask the mammoth; or Walt Disney should he ever thaw.
Local fish-n-chip shops have some excuses. Fresh potatoes are expensive, labour intensive and require a double fry. The frozen chips are cheap, fast and easy. And they do not care if I complain about the chips. If I don’t like it, I can get a fritter or a burger or piss off home to make my own. They’re busy. And I roll in their dismissal like any cheap food whore and I get my chips and I go home and I eat them, feel bloated, and wake up the next morning feeling used and vowing never to do it again…till the next time that I really don’t feel like cooking. Or I am at the seaside. Frozen chips don’t seem so bad near the sea side.
But we are now in the age of the gourmet fish-n-chip shop. A global trend, New Zealand has its own posh stores shiny with slick industrial settings, lush stools with napkin cups embedded in the benches. Cool halogen lights, a shabby chic blackboard on the wall with designer chalk handwriting telling you what is fresh off the boat for you to sacrifice in the deep fat fryer. Next to your tarakihi or your snapper you can get tuna kebabs or salmon croquettes. You can get your fish grilled and your chips potato gratineed. Menus expand to include chowder, Asian stir fried noodles, steamed mussels. Still in the midst of this cacophony and frippery and mockery of blue collar feeds is the sad, lurking truth: their chips are frozen. Beautiful, fresh succulent pieces of fish beer battered, tempura covered, set on a platter of pearls and some sad, indolent, frozen chips. Mutton dressed as lamb chips in their faux newspaper print or their brown bag containers never disguising that they’ve gypped the second player and sank on the chips.
It’s a mystery. Salt, an up-market slick haven of trendiness in the newly ritzy West Lynn neighborhood has all the makings of fancy faux fish-n-chip shop. Ewan McDonald described it as ‘big, clean, shiny black wood paneling and white tiles and long white tables and spongy stools. Little screens that play Finding Nemo’ (an unfortunate addiction to Pixar, the Incredibles were playing when we frequented — I would have loved to have seen Splash or Moby Dick just for some irony). McDonald hated the fish, poor thing didn’t get his favorite snapper but had to suffer the tarakihi, ‘tasteless, and the beer batter soggy rather than crisp’. However, he loved the chips, ‘superb: golden straight and long and thick as the ones in childhood’.
So I went to Salt. And I got some fish-n-chips. I got McDonald’s snapper. And I ordered the chips because he said they were ‘superb’. I was expecting fresh-cut. I also ordered chowder because it was there and I love chowder. The fish was great. Crispy, thick slab of golden fried fish garnished with a sprinkle of rough sea salt safely housed in its own kicky little white box. The chips were delivered in a brown paper bag exactly as Martha would have wanted it. And they were long and straight and golden and thick and once were frozen. As such, they don’t have flavour, they taste like cardboard and they are all identical. Don’t get me started on having to pay for the Watties sauce to dip them into give them some taste, noxious as it was. This is what McDonald equivocates to his childhood? Some things you should give up to a childish lack of appreciation. My brother ate everything with mayonnaise as a child — from Chinese food to fried chicken — he doesn’t miss the habit.
I loved the chowder.
Fish-n-chips are as traditional a meal as it can get, no matter what we try to do to it, no matter how much we gussy it up, fish-n-chips is a slice of white fish deep fried with deep fried ‘chipped’ potatoes. Fresh, never frozen, chipped potatoes. It is fish-n-chips, not fish-then-chips. These two are a pair and demand equal respect. Just because chips lost the coin toss and, thus, first billing, doesn’t mean that it is the support group to the fish, Paul to his John, Sonny to his Cher. Treat your chips as you would your fish. That’s being honestly gourmet. That’s what turns the meal into something special and makes it worth the treat. Just like grandpa used to eat.
Fried fish came to England with the Sephardic Jews in the 17th century as Pescado Frito. It adopted the name fried fish, usually plaice, and became popular street food in London in the 1850s. Luckily, ice cream debuted on the street the same year so you could have a piece of plaice and a scoop of plain ice cream as the newly happening lunchtime treat. However, Fish and Ice Cream couldn’t draw the crowds and never became a solid duet. Ice cream definitely found its own career as a solo act and soon fried fish began looking for a new dance partner. Up north in Scotland, deep fried ‘chipped’ potatoes were becoming popular. Though no one has yet discerned when ‘fish’ met ‘chips’, Joseph Marin celebrated their commercial debut with the first fish and chip shop serving the pair together in newsprint in London in 1860.
Fish-n-chips toured New Zealand soon after and was a regular on the hotel lunch counters and in dining rooms by 1870. Kiwis never called it the ‘chipper’ like they did at Home, but always the ‘fish-n-chip shop’ or, incongruously, a restaurant, thus ensuring that a variety of seafood would be available in such places. Fried clams, oysters, prawns, if it stood still long enough it ended up in the deep fat fryer. But not like the Scottish, with their deep fried haggis or their deep fried mars bars. Oceanic produce only, please, perhaps bending slightly to include a fritter of pineapple or banana. But, always, always, always served with a serving of chips.
I have never loved the potato. Those who do are awfully sensitive about chips. The times, moods and accoutrements that can accompany wedges, shoestrings, skinny, curly, krinkle (note the ‘k’), chunky — as many types as the Eskimos recognize for snow — the potato fried has many hats. But when I say ‘Fish-n-chips’, this conjures its own particular type of fry: the fresh cut chip.
Oh New Zealand! We love your fish. Exotic names like Tarakihi, Guernard, Hoki, Snapper. New Zealand your fish delights but your chips! Your chips cause no end of grief. Frozen. Frozen! Nothing good comes out of frozen. Ask the mammoth; or Walt Disney should he ever thaw.
Local fish-n-chip shops have some excuses. Fresh potatoes are expensive, labour intensive and require a double fry. The frozen chips are cheap, fast and easy. And they do not care if I complain about the chips. If I don’t like it, I can get a fritter or a burger or piss off home to make my own. They’re busy. And I roll in their dismissal like any cheap food whore and I get my chips and I go home and I eat them, feel bloated, and wake up the next morning feeling used and vowing never to do it again…till the next time that I really don’t feel like cooking. Or I am at the seaside. Frozen chips don’t seem so bad near the sea side.
But we are now in the age of the gourmet fish-n-chip shop. A global trend, New Zealand has its own posh stores shiny with slick industrial settings, lush stools with napkin cups embedded in the benches. Cool halogen lights, a shabby chic blackboard on the wall with designer chalk handwriting telling you what is fresh off the boat for you to sacrifice in the deep fat fryer. Next to your tarakihi or your snapper you can get tuna kebabs or salmon croquettes. You can get your fish grilled and your chips potato gratineed. Menus expand to include chowder, Asian stir fried noodles, steamed mussels. Still in the midst of this cacophony and frippery and mockery of blue collar feeds is the sad, lurking truth: their chips are frozen. Beautiful, fresh succulent pieces of fish beer battered, tempura covered, set on a platter of pearls and some sad, indolent, frozen chips. Mutton dressed as lamb chips in their faux newspaper print or their brown bag containers never disguising that they’ve gypped the second player and sank on the chips.
It’s a mystery. Salt, an up-market slick haven of trendiness in the newly ritzy West Lynn neighborhood has all the makings of fancy faux fish-n-chip shop. Ewan McDonald described it as ‘big, clean, shiny black wood paneling and white tiles and long white tables and spongy stools. Little screens that play Finding Nemo’ (an unfortunate addiction to Pixar, the Incredibles were playing when we frequented — I would have loved to have seen Splash or Moby Dick just for some irony). McDonald hated the fish, poor thing didn’t get his favorite snapper but had to suffer the tarakihi, ‘tasteless, and the beer batter soggy rather than crisp’. However, he loved the chips, ‘superb: golden straight and long and thick as the ones in childhood’.
So I went to Salt. And I got some fish-n-chips. I got McDonald’s snapper. And I ordered the chips because he said they were ‘superb’. I was expecting fresh-cut. I also ordered chowder because it was there and I love chowder. The fish was great. Crispy, thick slab of golden fried fish garnished with a sprinkle of rough sea salt safely housed in its own kicky little white box. The chips were delivered in a brown paper bag exactly as Martha would have wanted it. And they were long and straight and golden and thick and once were frozen. As such, they don’t have flavour, they taste like cardboard and they are all identical. Don’t get me started on having to pay for the Watties sauce to dip them into give them some taste, noxious as it was. This is what McDonald equivocates to his childhood? Some things you should give up to a childish lack of appreciation. My brother ate everything with mayonnaise as a child — from Chinese food to fried chicken — he doesn’t miss the habit.
I loved the chowder.
Fish-n-chips are as traditional a meal as it can get, no matter what we try to do to it, no matter how much we gussy it up, fish-n-chips is a slice of white fish deep fried with deep fried ‘chipped’ potatoes. Fresh, never frozen, chipped potatoes. It is fish-n-chips, not fish-then-chips. These two are a pair and demand equal respect. Just because chips lost the coin toss and, thus, first billing, doesn’t mean that it is the support group to the fish, Paul to his John, Sonny to his Cher. Treat your chips as you would your fish. That’s being honestly gourmet. That’s what turns the meal into something special and makes it worth the treat. Just like grandpa used to eat.
