Fish and chips: From iconic favourite to modern revival
Key topics:
History of fish and chips from 1860s to 20th-century peak popularity
Decline due to overfishing, rising cod prices, and fewer shops
Hopeful revival via aquaculture and continued national affection
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By Peter Dearlove
Fish and chips, wrapped in a page of yesterday’s newspaper, is everyone’s idea of the quintessential Englishman’s favourite fast food. It reached the peak of its popularity sometime in the 20th century between two world wars because it was easy to get, ready in minutes, tasty, nourishing, thoroughly satisfying and, above all, cheap. At one time in those years in Britain there were 35 000 fish and chip shops, and they all did very well, some working 24 hours a day and seven days a week. The fish they sold was mostly cod. In towns and cities all around the country you can still see faded signs on brick walls where some of them once did their flourishing business.
Today there are less than 10 000 of them, and the fish they sell is only cod if you ask for it and are happy to pay what is now quite a stiff price. What has happened? Have tastes just changed? Is this the end of a national favourite?
To begin with, fish and chips as a food pairing in Britain goes back to the 1860s. But even before that, fillets of fish dipped in batter and fried in a bath of boiling cooking oil were already quite widely in favour, known as Jewish-style fried fish from the way religious Sephardic people cooked fish on Fridays for eating cold the next day on the Sabbath when cooking was forbidden. How potato chips came into the picture is not particularly well recorded. In one of his novels Charles Dickens mentions potato slices done in ‘reluctant drops of oil’, so they were obviously already around by the mid 1800s just waiting to be linked up with fish to be made famous. As for the preferred fish partner, cod has always been popular in Britain because it was the most abundant fish in the seas around the island: good tasting, easily caught in large numbers and therefore the cheapest. No one knows when salt and vinegar, or a squeeze of lemon, joined the party, but the dressing became a permanent part of the dish a long time ago and is still with us.
The decline in the number of fish and chip sellers is a comparatively recent phenomenon, and other factors are involved, but over-fishing and the resulting rising price are undoubtedly the main drivers. Fish was once cheap, now it is expensive, and climbing inexorably to the point where it can be compared to beef. The two are already surprisingly close – at harbour market and abattoir level they both begin at around £5 per kg, where once they were miles apart. What makes that significant is more mindset than reality – historically beef in Britain was the Rolls-Royce and fish the people’s Model T. In 1970 a portion of fish and chips in London was 25 pence. Ten years later it had risen almost 300% to 85 pence. Over the next ten years it doubled and then doubled again. All these rises reflected the increasing price of fish far more than that of potatoes.
Scientific assessments confirm the degree to which cod stocks were being run down in the seas around Britain over roughly the same time: 92% down since 1980 in waters west of Scotland, 88% in the Celtic Sea, 89% in the Irish Sea since 1960, and 59% in the North Sea since 1963. These are sobering numbers, not far short of population collapses, and one wonders why it was allowed to happen. All the interested parties had agreed on permissible levels of fishing, and at one time the steady depletion of the species appeared to be coming under control. Then, quite suddenly, the targets seemed to be abandoned, and the depletion resumed with a vengeance. In any other context this series of events, and the result, might be called catastrophic, but that seems not to be the case in the world of fishing and thus of fish and chips. The people most concerned – the fishing industry on one hand and the shop owners on the other – are remarkably bullish about their business. They say things are ‘holding up’ and the future is positively bright.
One of the things that evidently gives them cause for optimism is aquaculture. Like trout, salmon and a few other species, cod are now being produced in sea-farming operations in Norway, the US and several other countries. Although firm figures are hard to get hold of, there are convincing reports that farming now accounts for about 20 000 tons of the cod supply annually. That is still way below the demand of approximately 800 000 tons, but at least it is happening, and with growing success. It may be that farming of the oceans will bring about the dramatic sort of changes to mankind’s way of life that farming the land did when we began the transformation from hunter-gatherers into landowners, home builders, citizens and
nations. And since the farming of animals leads to breeding for better and more prolific stock, may we not also look forward to bigger and better breeds of fish and the ultimate replenishment of the several species that are currently endangered?
A more prosaic cause for optimism about the future of fish and chips, however, is the degree to which it has weathered the price storm already, demonstrating thereby a depth of national affection that could carry it forward no matter what. There is plenty of evidence for this sense of ownership and pride. If not exactly the national dish that stiff mealie meal porridge with gravy may be to many African people, it is not far off, and the British still love to eat it and talk about it. Trade figures claim that the annual consumption is 360 million portions of fish and chips every year, most of them still with the traditional salt and vinegar dressing, but now no longer available in a page yesterdays Daily Trumpeter. That was outlawed on sanitary grounds sometime in the 1980s.
