Fish and chips

A fillet of white fish in a crisp batter, deep-fried and served with thick-cut fried potatoes, salt and malt vinegar: that is fish and chips, and the shops that sell it still outnumber any restaurant chain in Britain. It is British in the way few dishes are: the two halves arrived separately, fried fish with Jewish immigrants from Portugal and Spain in London in the early nineteenth century and chipped potatoes in the industrial north, and they met in shops in the 1860s, with both Mossley near Oldham and London's East End claiming the first. By the First World War there were tens of thousands of chippies, and the dish was one of the few foods never rationed in the Second. Cod and haddock are the standard fish, cod more common in the south, haddock in Scotland and the north-east; plaice, hake and pollock turn up regionally. The frying fat matters: beef dripping in the north and Midlands, vegetable oil elsewhere.