What was the first fish and chip shop in the UK (which battered the fish like most chippies do today)? What century do fish and chips originate from?
From here:
Wikipedia agrees that Joseph Malin’s fish and chips shop in London was probably the first, opened in 1860. I’m not sure when deep-fried battered fish originated; Wikipedia says that it was popular in London in the 19th century, and that chips were common in the north of England. Popular lore likely suggests that fish and chips have been eaten in Traditional English Pubs since time immemorial.
On the subject of English pubs, another dish that one might think has been eaten since time immemorial is the ploughman’s lunch, a meal of Cheddar or Stilton cheese with pickle and buttered bread. It was actually invented in the 1970s.
I have this strange aversion to accepting things I read in Wikipedia about word origins. I’m sure they mean well, but they are a bunch of amatuers when it comes to word/phrase origins.
The exact quote over at Wikipedia about ploughman’s lunch is
NO IT WASN’T.
If it were, then I could not have found cites for the term and descriptions from US newspapers as early as 1964.
I’m not about to say that it isn’t a 20th century invention of pubs in England. Probably is.
Sorry for the hijack.
Sooo, this isn’t about the first fish and chop ship?
Rats…I could really go for some fish and chops. Ahoy! Chop ship!..
Yeah, the 1970’s seems kind of late. And I’m sure that people have been eating bread and cheese together for a very long time. Maybe even with a pickle. So I offer this alternative history for the ploughman’s lunch:
Did you know? The ploughman’s lunch was invented at the 1904 World’s Fair when someone selling Frankfurter sausages ran out of white gloves and began to sell the sausages on buns, thereby inventing the hot dog. He had just run out of sausages when John Jacob Astor* came to his booth and demanded a marvelous new taste sensation. So he borrowed some cheese from the man who had just invented the cheeseburger and named the new sandwich ‘the Ploughman’s Luncheon’, after his friend Phineas R. Ploughman, who had the misfortune of being the only food-seller who got through the entire 1904 World’s Fair without inventing a new food by running out of something.
*: Or Teddy Roosevelt, or a Vanderbilt or Rockefeller. It helps if the person is somehow ironic, particularly if they died on the Titanic, Lusitania or Hindenburg.
Well, as long as time immemorial is some time after 1492, as potatos (and therefor chips) came from the Americas. And it took a long time after that (about 1780) before it became popular anywhere in Europe.
Brilliant! Did you write that yourself?
Yes, but not without hearing about a huge number of foods that were supposedly invented at the 1904 World’s Fair. (Unwrapped is a big culprit for food legends like these.) Maybe it’ll become a chain e-mail someday. =)
Actually, in English law, “time immemorial” is strictly defined as “before 1189” if I recall correctly. Cite.
So no spuds there, then.
And you don’t improve the article why?
Cite? I’d like to do the work in fixing up the encyclopedia
Now I have a problem with this. In all my 44 years born and living in the UK, and therefore around 34 years of visiting pubs, I’ve *never * been in a pub which sells “traditional fish and chips”. You need a proper chip shop for those. The closest I’ve seen in a pub is a very poor approximation, similar to the homogenized muck found in a typical fast food joint / roadside cafe.
Any other Brit ever seen REAL fish’n’chips in a pub? 
“The Sun” one of my local pubs, sells fish and chips to take out. I can’t vouch for their quality as I haven’t tried them.
If pushed I’ll sometimes have a sit down meal of fish and chips in a pub, but to have them to take away is a step too far.
What next? Pubs allowing women in the public bar… where will it all end? 
The OED has their first cite for Ploughman’s Lunch as from 1837:
However, the next cite is from 1970, so it’s likely the term went into disuse for a century.
Re: OP
Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips bought the recipe from Malin’s of Bow in 1969 in order to use “The Original Fish and Chips” as their slogan.
RealityChuck: An OED cite is exactly what we need. If it’s attested to 1837, then it was likely being used even before that. It might have been used long after 1837 without being attested in any formal written matter (or perhaps it was, and didn’t make it into the OED). You’d expect the name of a food to be written mostly in ephemeral publications such as restaurant menus and reviews in newspapers – I’m not sure if the OED uses those.
Shrinking Violet: Well, in Canada and presumably in the US, every place called a ‘traditional English pub’ has ‘traditional English fish and chips’. It’s not at all the same kind of thing you’d get at a place that specializes in fish and chips. One thing is that the chips will be the same as the fries that you’d get with anything else on the menu. Pubs and bars tend to have better-than-average fries, but they’re still likely to be frozen, and they’re terrifyingly likely to be coated with some sort of batter that I think makes them value-added ‘crispy fries’. (That is, a foodservice company tells the restaurant they can charge more for them because they’re ‘crispy’.) The fish is usually deep-fried and you often have a choice between two kinds of fish. But the flavor isn’t the same. I think the key to the flavor of fish and chips is that both have been fried in oil that was used to cook many other fish-and-chip meals. At a proper fish-and-chips place, the food is usually greasy but very flavorful.
Does anyone know what kind of oil the early fish-and-chips shops would have used? I suspect it might have been lard or some other Victorian-era fat. Certainly it wasn’t peanut or canola oil. Oh, and it all would have ZERO TRANS FAT because hydrogenation hadn’t been invented yet.
Also, anyone know when tartar sauce was invented? Or when it became common to put lemon juice on fish-and-chips? (this might just be a Canadian thing, though)
According to this site, concoctions similar to tartar sauce were made in medieval times, and modified from ancient Roman recipes. However, modern tartar sauce’s major ingredient is mayonnaise, which is believed to have originated after France’s 1756 capture of the Minorcan capital of Mahon. The linked page’s oldest recipe for tartar sauce dates to 1845.
Regarding the fat the chips are cooked in. Traditionally it should be beef dripping. There are a few chip shops that still use this . I knew of a few in East Anglia including the chip stalls on Great Yarmouth market , but it has been about 10 years since I have been there so things might have changed.
There’s an urban legend claiming fish and chips first sprang from a monastery, where they had fish friars and chip monks. No historical evidence survives, though.
There was a chip shop in the East Anglian town where I grew up which used beef dripping. The rest of my family loved the flavour, but I hated it - it tasted kinda rancid :eek: and always made me physically ill. I had to get my chish’n’fips from a different shop to everyone else. :rolleyes:
And to wash it all down a pint of Abbot Ale.