Fish and chips Period BOrigin theory BVerified

Fish and chips, fried fish served with fried potatoes, appears to have taken shape in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century, roughly between 1840 and 1870.

Cod, the fish at its centre, had long been caught in the seas around Britain. The potato reached England at the end of the sixteenth century and was widely eaten by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

From the 1840s, cheap fish began to travel inland in quantity. At Hull, on England's east coast, North Sea trawling (dragging a net to take fish from near the seabed) took hold in the 1840s, and after 1840 a railway linked the port with the industrial West Riding of Yorkshire. In 1843 the rich fishing ground known as the Great Silver Pit was found only about fifty miles out, and the number of fishing smacks sailing from Hull rose from 29 in 1845 to about 270 in 1863. From 1864 the newly formed Hull Ice Company made ice cheaply available at the port.

Fried in cheap oil and paired with fried potatoes, this cheap fish became the fare of shops serving working people. Hull later came to specialise in cheaper fish for the fish-and-chip shops of the north, while Grimsby concentrated on prime fish, much of it for London; that division was already visible before 1914.

Two places claim "the world's first fish and chip shop." In the London account, Joseph Malin, a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe, opened a shop in the east of the city around 1860 that sold both fried fish and fried potatoes, and the national association of fish friers has honoured it as the first in the world. In the Lancashire account, John Lees began selling from a hut at the market in Mossley and in 1863 opened a shop on Stamford Street; the shop itself has long claimed the title.

Both claims rest on later tributes from the trade and on the histories the shops have told of themselves. John K. Walton, who wrote a history of fish and chips and the British working class, likewise says that no one knows which came first.

What the two claims dispute, moreover, is only which shop first sold the pair together, not the beginning of fried fish, which was in London earlier. In Oliver Twist, published as a book in 1838, Charles Dickens describes Field Lane, a narrow London alley whose shops sold silk handkerchiefs bought from pickpockets, and gives it "its barber, its coffee-shop, its beer-shop, and its fried-fish warehouse." The Jewish Manual, published in London in 1846 and one of the earliest Jewish cookbooks in English, describes fish coated in egg and flour, fried hot in plenty of oil and served cold. Henry Mayhew, surveying London's street sellers in 1851, wrote that fried fish had "for many years formed a portion of the street trade," and counted about 300 sellers.

Mayhew's fried-fish sellers offered bread with the fish; their cry was "fish and bread, a penny." Potatoes appear in the same survey as baked potatoes, a separate street trade. Fried potato turns up in English in Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1859), as "husky chips of potato, fried with some reluctant drops of oil," though the passage belongs to a street scene of hunger in the Saint-Antoine quarter of Paris. Fried fish and fried potatoes each existed before 1860; when the two first met on one plate is not known.

The prevailing view is that a line of fried fish brought to Britain by Sephardic Jews, the pescado frito, and a separate line of fried potatoes came together in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. Panikos Panayi, a historian of migration, follows the same line in Fish and Chips: A History (2014). The phrase "fish and chips" appears in newspapers from around 1880, and the Oxford English Dictionary cites an 1887 Sheffield newspaper.