Fish & Chips

I've lived in a couple of UK seaside towns and they used to be great places for a kid - all sun, sand, amusements and junk food, where you could have a good day out for a few pennies. Nowadays UK seaside towns have become the favored dwelling place of dole scroungers, homeless Eastern Europeans and charity shops. I still hope one day to go back for a few hours for the one and only purpose of eating traditional British seaside fish and chips, one of the best meals in the world.

In this one town there used to be an old cobbled street that you could walk down which ended at the harbor where they landed the fresh fish catch. Right at the bottom of this street was a tiny restaurant which served me one of the best fish and chips I ever had. The whole walk down the street was a treat as a kid. There was a joke shop on the right where you could spend hours perusing fake dog turds, itching powder and joke chewing gum packets which snapped on the fingers of friends when you offered it to them. They also sold nudie playing cards and I invested in two sets of these as a kid. (The first was very small and cost 15p, or 25c, so I upgraded when I could afford it.)

Further down on the left was the rock shop where they made the hard sticks of rock with the name of the town running through them. This they did by starting with a cylinder of sticky candy more than a foot in diameter and then hand-rolling it down to the inch-thick, generally pink, tooth-breaking candy. I'm not sure Americans know what this stuff is but it used to be the most widely accepted way over there to lose teeth as a child. There were other little shops as well, selling seaside tat, souvenirs and those mugs made to look like faces. As a kid I didn't have the cash to buy fish and chips so the walk terminated at the donut van which parked at the bottom of the street and which sold bags of hot sugared donuts which my mother would never have allowed me to eat between meals, had she known.

The fish and chip shop, however, was a temple of pleasure, a monument to the simple joy of things done right. I could not recreate the flavor if I tried, but below are the principle components of a good fish and chip meal at a seaside restaurant:

1. The fish should ideally be huss. This is hard to find now but years ago it was the cheaper stuff that was bought for the kids. It has wonderful soft flesh and just one thick bone running down the middle so no risk of choking (unless you are a complete fuckwit). It must be battered and deep-fried.

2. Chips should be thickly cut from real potatoes and deep fried in unhealthy oil.

3. Mushy peas should accompany the fish and chips. Lurid artificial green color is considered a definite bonus.

4. Bread and butter should sit alongside on a side plate. The bread should be square, cheap and white, and butter should be thickly applied.

5. A pot of scalding hot tea made with real tea leaves should also be sitting on the table. Tizer or Irn-Bru would be acceptable soda for kids; coke only as a last resort but not diet coke, OK? This is a festival of indulgence and calories should not be skimped.

6. Condiments should be tomato ketchup and vinegar. The ketchup should not be in a Heinz bottle; it should be in a gaudy red plastic container shaped like a tomato with a green top, from which you squeeze the ketchup over your chips.

7. Nothing should be left on your plate. You should push back from the table like one of those six hundred pound fat fuckers who's waiting for the wall of his house to be removed so he can be forklifted into an ambulance.

8. Dessert should never be ordered. Acceptable substitutes include a visit to the rock shop, a short walk to the donut van or a Mr.Whippy ice cream with a chocolate flake in it.

I have a suspicion that there is nowhere left that is capable of serving fish and chips the way it should be done. Take-out fish from a high-street chip shop is good but it's not the same thing. If I ever make it back to that town I expect that the old cobbled high street will be full of estate agents, employment agencies or cheap jewellers. Not only may it not be possible to get good fish and chips but I'm buggered if I know where I can find new nudie playing cards. You can hardly make out the nipples on my old set...


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison