Name: Fish and chips review by Zeyn at The Lucas Arms, London, United Kingdom
Item: Fish and chips
Rating: 4.3
Author: Zeyn

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.

The batter is flour, a raising agent and a cold liquid, most often beer or sparkling water, mixed thinly and kept cold so it puffs on contact with the hot fat. The fillet is dried, floured and dipped, then lowered into fat at around 180°C and held for a moment so it does not stick, frying for six to eight minutes until the batter is golden and the fish inside is just flaking. The chips are the harder part. Floury potatoes such as Maris Piper are cut thick, rinsed, blanched in fat at a low temperature until soft, then rested and fried a second time hot so the outside crisps; a single fry gives pale, limp chips. Everything is salted the second it leaves the fat, and a proper shop wraps the order in paper so it steams a little on the way home.

Judge the batter first: it should be crisp and light, shattering rather than bending, and it should sit on the fish, not hang off it as a thick shell with a gap of steam underneath. Grease pooling on the paper means the fat was too cool. The fish should be white, moist and in large flakes; dry or rubbery flesh is overcooked, and a grey, mushy centre is a fillet fried from frozen without thawing. Chips should be fluffy inside with a crisp outside and real potato flavour. Mark down thin fries from a freezer bag, batter that has gone soft under the fish, vinegar that is not malt vinegar, and portions where the fish is a sliver inside a thick coat. Mushy peas, curry sauce, pickled onions and a wally are all legitimate sides, but the fish and the chips carry the score.

Fish and chips

United Kingdom

The Lucas Arms

İngiltere kültürüne ait bir yemek olan fish and chips’i deneme fırsatım oldu. Gerçekten lezzetli ve herkesin mutlaka denemesi gereken bir lezzet. Gittiğimiz mekan İngiltere kültürünü yansıtan bir mekandı. Keyif aldık :) 

Fish and chips review by Zeyn at The Lucas Arms, London, United Kingdom

Fish and chips

The Lucas Arms

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