And now that I think of it, in the east of Scotland they put brown sauce on fish and chips.
Heresy! Everyone knows that it is supposed to be salt and vinegar.
Now there’s a can of worms, chips vary regionally all over the country (UK). Some places have just salt and vinegar, others put “sauce” (which is some sort of concoction I think East of scotland), Gravy (a different kind of gravy, not US based, UK, thicker), Brown sauce (Daddies and HP), Mushy peas, and a few other variations. Chip firmness varies quite a lot too, crispy in some parts, I remember down in Reading they were all mushy in a big lump. Local to where I am in Wolverhampton, they batter them lightly in a turmeric batter so they are yellow.
So there’s no once chip to rule them all in the UK. Oh no.
Here’s the yellow crispy ones.
How weird! I lived several months in Wolverhampton back in 1996, and I don’t remember those. Are they relatively recent? I suppose I could have just not noticed as well. I don’t remember eating tons of chips—mostly just South Asian food. But I did visit the occasional chippie.
one of those other variations is, of course, curry sauce.
I’m happy to go with any of them but salt and vinegar is non-negotiable for all of them.
And I speak wherof I know, my parents ran a chippy in the north-east of England for many years. For the person upthread who suggested a chip butty as a dish of shame? Well I say shame on you.
Proper thick chips double fried in beef dripping, fresh, hot and rammed into a soft bread roll with salt. vinegar and condiment of your choice…luxury.
I believe these are (or at least were) called Three Musketeers bars in the US.
IIRC, UK Marathon bars are Snickers in the US.
I seem to remember that UK Curley-Wurley bars became Marathon bars in the US, but that was back in the '70s.
Oh that changed in the 90s, it’s been Snickers in the UK since then.
Ah I knew there was an obvious one I’d missed, our local chippie closed just after the pandemic so not been further afield to be to a real chippie for a long time.
There is another variation called “Irish curry sauce” somewhere about my area, apparently. I’ve not had it, so can’t comment on it, but it has featured in some pubs nearby, and I think it’s sweeter than the normal curry sauce. There was a large amount of Irish immigrants around the area for a long time, so perhaps it came to areas of the town.
Wolverhampton is a strange town (now city) that way. The chip shop about 3 minutes walk from my house, now closed, did them and a few others. Others didn’t, and if you walked a bit further you’d get normal chips. My friend who was born and bred in the area didn’t like them, but they were familiar to him in his 5 decades in the area.
It also has a large Indian population but weirdly few Indian restaurants anymore (it used to have loads), apparently the Indian people wouldn’t go out for Indian meals, so a lot died out, and a lot existed because of the post-pub grub thing which has long gone.
The chip shop used to be full of Indian people on a Friday night though, but you would rarely see one in the Chinese takeaways, not popular with the demographic.
Wolverhampton however, continues to have Mr Sizzle, the worst burger van in the world.
Hah! I discovered Mr Sizzle back then — and it may well have been you who told me the name on these boards as I recounted one of my most memorable culinary experiences with that sad simulacrum of a hamburger.
Too bad about the Indian places, as Wolverhampton is where I first really dove headfirst into Indian food and my love for the cuisine began.
Yep, thought I remembered the post. Ten years ago:
I present to you Australia’s entry in this category, the Chiko Roll.
A foodstuff designed primarily to be eaten at the football while held in one hand, while throwing beer cans with the other.
A Chiko Roll’s filling is primarily cabbage and barley, as well as carrot, green beans, beef, beef tallow, wheat cereal, celery and onion. The filling is partially pulped and enclosed in a thick egg and flour pastry tube, designed to survive handling at football matches. The roll is typically deep-fried in vegetable oil.
Just sounds like a regular old egg roll to me.
Sounds like a very cheap and appallingly flavo(u)red copy of a real egg roll to me.
What has happened to the “post-pub grub thing” that has caused a die-out? Being famished after a long night of drinking seems an eternal need that wants eternal fulfillment.
What is this ignorant Yank missing about UK pub culture in recent years post-COVID? Or is this merely an artifact of COVID that has not yet recovered completely but is trying gamely?
Ah yes, that is a bit of British (frankly English, I can’t remember a lot of it in Scotland) culture. Scotland had different licensing rules, so you’d often have later times.
Before, I think late 80s, the typical English pub opened maybe 11:00-14:30, shut for a few hours (to make sure the workers went back to work), reopened at 17:00 and opened until 23:00 (practicalities about strict drinking up times meant it mostly meant 20-30 minutes after this). Some extra hours were available for Bank holiday Sundays, and little exceptions happened outside nightclubs.
So typically any day of the week, if you’d hit 23:00 and that was it, home.
Except restaurants were allowed to open later, but really only Indian ones did. So you got a culture of people falling out of the pub en-masse, then going for a curry, purely because you could get a couple more pints down you. They really only wanted maybe to have one more drink, and would be done by 1am.
This also led to a lot of Indian restaurants not opening lunchtimes, because they were open late. Even to this day it isn’t normal for them to open midday, usually about 5pm. One or two around our way does now, and people still don’t go and don’t even consider it possible it was that way for so long.
(In Scotland, due to the late curry not being a thing, they’d often open at lunch and offer smaller three course fixed price meals)
Weirdly, and I have no idea how this became a thing, especially pre-internet, in England, running away from an Indian restaurant without paying seemed to happen regularly. The people doing this seemed to treat it as hilarious when in reality stealing (yes, they’d be drunk). I did find it hilarious when some I saw did this in an Indian restaurant in Antwerp, Belgium, where the police with guns marched them straight back in a minute later. A baton may have been used to stop them.
So if you want a REAL national dish of shame, it’s an unpaid curry in England.
You can still eat food post-pub (which are open later now) now, but few will have sit-down and I think the market disappeared for licensed with drinks. So it’s mostly takeaway only, but around our way you can get kebabs and burgers till 5am.
Yesterday, while browsing reddit, I learned of the existance of the Scottish munchy box. It seems to be a pizza takeout box loaded with late night favorites. This photo album does paint a compelling picture:
Some amusing comment in the thread:
https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/136otw3/til_a_munchy_box_is_a_popular_take_away_food_item/
In that box you’d typically get chips, kebab meat, chicken wings (probably tandoori), onion rings and vegetable pakora, as well as some salad. Some seem to have nan breads and pitas in there, but I don’t think it is typical. The tubs will contain chilli sauce for the kebab, and pink sauce for the pakora.
Seen many pictures, never had one. I’d not be bothered by the onion rings and chips, and not that bothered by wings. I’d just have a kebab and veg pakora.
I’d have said the pinnacle of scottish cuisine was dodging past the battered bacon wrapped, deep fried sausages, and straight into kebab meat on chips covered with cheese. Not for the faint hearted, and if you didn’t have heart problems before, you will after that.
Is the shaved meat we see in that pic of a munchy box what you’d call “kebab meat” in Scottish / UK parlance?
Over here the stuff in the pic would be “gyro meat”, and I’d / we’d expect “kebab meat” to be some sort of bite sized chunks of chicken or ~cubes of marinated beefsteak.
The term would be “donner kebab meat” in the UK. I think I’ve seen it called something like Doner Kebap meat in the US. Gyros is a version in eastern europe, and sort of Greece (I’ve had greek gyros nothing like that also).
The basic Donner kebab in the UK, is typically a chunk of lamb mince breaded with spices, hung on a huge chunk in front of a grill/toast/broil, and sliced off with a slicer. You can get other types of kebab meat too, chicken spiced, and stacked (like some mexican version of this too), and other variations, spiced tikka, pork in Germany. So a Kebab is general type of thing, like Chicken, and Donner is the specific minced lamb version (I’m guessing normally beef in the US, lamb not being big there).
They are normally cooked on a big spike. There’s other little (non takeaway) kebabs were you stick chunks of meat and veg onto a wooden spike and grill/broil them. Kebab is cooking on a spike.
In addition to thinking of it as gyros, shawarma is also pretty close. Actually, I’m not entirely sure of the difference between shawarma and döner kebab that I’ve had. They both look exactly the same to me. And gyros is just the Greek version of that (traditionally pork, but here in the US usually made with a mix of ground beef and lamb in a gyros cone.)
What you are thinking of as kebabs are shish kebabs. Kebab comes in all sorts of types: köfte (meatball/ground meat cooked on a skewer), shish (chunks of meat cooked on skewers), döner (slices of meat cooked on a vertical spit) and some more that I am forgetting. But those are probably the most well known. And they may be spelled differently depending on who is serving them and where you are.
Best that I can tell, other than the type of meat, the main difference is the “fixins” - gyros, for instance, are served with yoghurt, while Shawarma is served with hummus and tahini. The breads are different, the veggies are different, the sauces are different… but other than that, they’re the same thing.
Oh, yeah, for gyros and shawarma, I can definitely give some general guidelines for the difference. It’s the döner vs shawarma that I’m unsure of. But they’re all the same idea. Hell, add al pastor tacos to that continuum of spiced meat cooked on a vertical spit.