Plain flour, salt and a can of warm flat beer. Just mix to a good consistency.
beer battered fish is the best!
Resisting the temptation to make a joke at the expense of some nations brewing abilities …
Pick a nation, any nation 
So? Does the average British fish-and-chips shop buy it fresh?
Don’t many commercial recipes assume the fish will be frozen as it’s battered and dropped in the fryer?
Good fish and chips depends a lot on the fish-haddock or cod is best. Most cheaper places use Alaskan Pollock, which is pretty close to tasteless. And-the real secret is that the fish and fries MUST be kept hot (after frying)-or else the whole thing becomes a greasy mess. The Brits have headed cases to accomplish this.
Not really. Many fish and chip establishments in the UK make a big deal of the freshness of their fish, particularly in seaside towns with a local fishing industry. Certainly in my experience, fish is cooked from thawed, but you don’t always see this - as noted, a heated unit is used to store cooked fish. I do prefer my fish straight from the fryer though, and try to order so this is the case. I’d rather wait a bit longer for that than a piece that has sat around for a bit.
Decent chip shops do. Nowhere is very far from the coast, after all, so coast to plate takes no more than a day, two with an intermediary, which is fine for most fresh fish.
What?! God no, does that even work? All the chip shops I’ve ever visited, you can see the chef dipping the unfrozen (and hopefully fresh) fish in batter with his fingers then dropping it by hand into the fryer.
Do you chill your red wine too? Or just your awful beer? 
I see the problem here - fish and chips should be done in beef dripping, not oil.
We have had a fair few Chinese etc take over existing chippies, and they always switch to oil, and then wonder where all their custom went.
Oil simply does not crisp the batter properly all the way through and the fish is generally poorly cooked, and the whole is a soggy and sometimes slimy mess.
There is a bit of a UK north south split, where oil is used down south and beef dripping up north. In the south it is expensive and rubbish, in the north its generally far better and cheaper. You get exceptions of course but if you are not sure of what you are looking for then,don’t go to a chippie that is run by anyone else than ethnic English staff just about every single chippy run by others is rubbish.
I generally agree about beef dripping for deep frying, but if the vegetable oil is fresh and hot it isn’t always bad.
Hmmm, well where we live, we always went to the ethnic Cypriot in the next village, because the local English run chippie is just dire. YMMV, but I generally judge on the presence of lots of locals as opposed to tourists. If the locals eat there, then it is probably fairly good.
Best chippie in Birmingham (my home city) was run by a family of Greek Cypriots. I went to school with the son, Costas. My parents had friends who owned a chippie (as part of a larger retail ‘empire’), and even they bought their fish n chips from the greeks.
The best chippie in my area is also run by Greek Cypriots. They also always use fresh fish and the chips are always freshly cooked.
I do think what you think of Fish and chips is going to depend a lot on the place you buy them from. They are plenty of places that serve crap fish and chips. It does seem to be a dish that is highly variable and when done wrong it’s pretty bad. When done right though it’s fantastic. Of course you have to have lots of salt and vinegar. Just the smell of fish and chips with salt and vinegar gets my mouth watering.
My Greek cypriots had a ‘chipper’ in the front of the shop, so you could see them pouring fresh, raw, unscrubbed maris piper potatoes into this big drum thing, which would peel, wash and chip the potatoes in one go and drop them into a bucket. Then the bucket would be tipped straight into the fryer. No frozen or processed foods there!
My old 86 year old mum, who acts and talks like the Queen, actually worked in her grandparents chip shop in Manchester during the war, peeling the potatoes by hand. Interesting fact: fish and chips weren’t rationed during the war, to keep up morale.
Here, the best chippies are run by Portuguese. And the default fish is Cape hake.
There used to a restaurant across a lot of the US that could deliver a pretty decent fish and fries dinner: Long John Silver’s. I’ll wait until the laughter dies down…
I’m not talking about today’s LJS or the the nineties, or even the eighties. I’m talking about late seventies-era LJS. Full, as they say, disclosure: I worked there from 1979-1984. We didn’t use “homemade” batter, but we used pre-packaged flour based ingredients, and mixed it up as needed. We didn’t have fresh fish, but we used good-quality frozen cod, which came in 50 lb blocks that we sliced into pieces in-store. As long as the batter was freshly made and the oil was up to standard (ie, used only for a given amount of time and replenished with fresh oil as needed, and of course at the right, hot, temperature), the fish was really quite good. I stopped eating there when I moved away, and couldn’t find them any more. Somewhere along the line, LJS’s quality slipped away. I ate there once or twice a few years ago. I don’t know for sure, but it seems to me that today they use pre-battered and cooked fish (Gorton’s or the like), and just zap it in the microwave, for all I know. But I see there is a restaurant nearby, where I now live. I’ll give it another try, but I’m not optimistic.
As the OP found out, it’s pretty easy to screw up fish and chips. But with just a few standards and close attention to detail, as LJS proved long ago, it’s pretty easy to get it right also.
The local Chinese place does the best chips round here. Can’t speak for the fish personally, as I don’t really eat fish, but others have recommended them. The English run shop up the road is crap by comparison- the chips are soggy and have a weird taste.
Incidently, all but one of the chippies near where I grew up in Lancashire/Cumbria used oil, only one used beef fat, and they made a really big deal about the fact. It’s certainly not the standard.
The main difference I’ve noticed in the chippies moving away from the North (apart from the price increase) is that a decent cheese 'n onion pie can’t be found for love nor money down here.
Yes.
This sentence, and sentences like it, are really depressing. ‘All of the chippes’, ‘The best chippies’… It’s like you guys have more than one! :eek: We have to go to a restaurant or a pub. There’s one chippie that I know of, in Fairhaven (which is a bit of a drive from the house). They operate out of a vintage double-decker London bus.
It must be nice to be walking down the street and say, ‘Hey, there’s a chippie! Let’s go get some fish’n’chips!’
It only just struck me that the local fish & chips chain in my home town was called Chappy’s.