The difference is that fish and chips in the States are well cooked, the batter is crispy, the fish delicious, and the chips crunchy and yielding inside.
Whereas to properly recreate the typical British experience, the batter should be soggy and slough off the fish when you attack it with your weird-ass wooden two-pronged fork. The fish should be slightly grey and fall apart. Some of the chips should have been through the fryer two or three times and be carbonised, while the rest should be soggy, pale and slightly raw in the middle.
But I don’t usually encounter chips as bad as those. Maybe five chips out of fifty would be that bad in a bad chippy, and my local does crap fish batter like you describe but perfect chips. Those chips are not crunchy - they’re not crisps - but they’re not raw or pale either. I think you’re kinda anti-romanticising it.
We didn’t advertise it on the board but such a request could be fulfilled. Damn I’m hungry now.
I worked there around 1990. The biggest change these days seems to be the default fish. Back then you got cod and had to order haddock or plaice on entry. Now haddock seems to be the fish de jour in every place I go. Apart from London where they eat dogfish cough “rock salmon”.
Concur. I don’t want crunchy chips in this context. I want some of them to be crispy, but I want the big ones to be a bit bendy and maybe some of them slightly doughy and stuck together. There’s nothing wrong with that - it’s like bacon - there’s a world of options besides cooking it to a brittle husk.
Yes, kinda. It’s junk food, not gourmet.
