Britain's national dish owes its fried fish to Sephardic Jewish refugees
The fried fish in Britain's favourite takeaway came with Spanish and Portuguese Jews who had lived in the Netherlands, frying in oil so Friday's fish could be eaten cold on the Sabbath. Joined with northern chip stalls in the 1860s, it grew to over 35,000 shops, and escaped rationing in both world wars.
Jewish immigrants began arriving from the 16th century, with the main wave reaching London in the 1850s, bringing fish coated in flour and fried in olive oil in the style of pescado frito. Charles Dickens mentioned fried fish warehouses in Oliver Twist in 1838, and Alexis Soyer printed a recipe for fried fish in the Jewish fashion, dipped in flour-and-water batter, in 1845. Fried potato chips were a separate northern trade; the Oxford English Dictionary's first example of the word in that sense comes from Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities in 1859.
Who combined them first is disputed. Joseph Malin, an Eastern European Jewish immigrant, opened a shop in Bow, East London, around 1860, and the National Federation of Fish Friers later honoured it as the first. A Mr Lees sold the pairing in Mossley, Lancashire, in 1863, and Oldham's Tommyfield Market carries a blue plaque as the rival claimant. North Sea trawling and railways rushing fresh catch to industrial cities turned the dish into working-class staple food. Malin's recipe and frying equipment were sold in the 1970s to the American chain Arthur Treacher's, and a few branches in northern Ohio still use them.
The government treated the dish as morale. According to historian John Walton, the cabinet made protecting its supply during World War I a priority, and it stayed off the ration again in World War II, when Winston Churchill called fish and chips the good companions. Harry Ramsden's shop in Guiseley, opened in 1928, served 10,000 portions on a single day in 1952, a Guinness record.
Emigrants carried the habit abroad. Giuseppe Cervi, an Italian who stepped off a ship in Cork by mistake in the 1880s, walked to Dublin and sold from a handcart; his wife's question, one of this, one of that, lives on as Dublin slang for the meal. It is New Zealand's most popular takeaway and Newfoundland's everyday cod supper.
Source: Fish and chips
