Photo by Davey Gravy on Unsplash
Anyone who tells you the measure of a chippy is the freshness of its fish is lying. This deception is not by malice but by negligence in observing the true place a chippy holds in culinary society, and what other staples make it the go-to Friday night or quick weekend tea that many have been born to love. I mean, southern imitations of the humble chippy have gotten it all wrong.
The saveloy did not come into this world worrying about freshness and the best cuts of meat. If ever I wanted a high-meat-percentage sausage, I would likely not buy a lamp-lit, balloon-wrapped, amalgam of offcuts, yet it has remained on chip shop menus for decades. Therefore, it must be something beyond freshness that entices people to the chippy. If sweaty sausages and meat-of-non-descript-origin pies persist as mainstays at the glass-fronted greenhouse counter, freshness cannot figure. To this end, I argue spam endeavours to increase the representation of mish-mash-meat in the chippy and does so to great effect in the North. In no chippy south of Peterborough have I been treated to such delicacies as deep-fried Spam, even if in that poor South creeping city it was sold as a gimmick.
Furthermore, though the days of receiving your chips wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper are now gone, the tradition indicates a long-standing disregard for current affairs, which includes the catching of morning fish. Were I a fish, caught and driven, cold and fuming, to my place of frying through long haul transit before 8 am, I would be most disgruntled and hope to taste, for by captor’s customer, terribly. I dare say the South cares not for the morning routines of haddock, plaice, or cod. The average eater, of whom I know many, cannot, with any reliability, discern a fresh fish from one caught and properly handled three days before purchase. It is an unnecessary effort that drives up cost, which inflation does a good enough job of on its own.
Freshness and quality are often set beside one another in the food industry, but they should not feature in chippies and kebab shops. Take tripe: once available in chip shops throughout the North, a chippy in Stoke now claims to be the only one still serving it. Though I am not advocating its reintroduction to the public eye (tripe, not Stoke), I am observing its once-popular sale to show (along with the other delights I have mentioned thus far) that neither freshness nor quality bothers the chippy clientele.
The chippy has never been a bastion of overlooked Michelin star potential and never should be. People do not care what is in the food; the joy of the chippy is how cheap and easy it is to get. This is the point the South has collectively missed. They should be cheap, cheerful, and kept as simple as possible. Never should a restaurant take itself seriously, charging anything north of £10 for a substantial portion of fish and chips, and no one can convince me otherwise (eat your hearts out, Kerridge and Ramsay). Anyone who pays £30 for fish and chips is an imbecile, and anyone who sells it does not do so in the spirit of community, love of food, or respect for what a chippy, as an institution, represents. Obsession and greed are not core values of the chippy. Further south than these London establishments, as we stray further from the home of the chip butty toward Southampton, for example, the chippy is a rarer sight. One I have spied in that Itchen town, another tucked away in the uppity Winchester, neither appreciated as they should be, neither selling chips overflowing the bun or cheap cuts of fish. The economics of a chip shop is the focus of the South, not the warm service of the North, so the chippy is disanimated.
The disanimation of the South is the realisation of the projection of clean business onto a not-so-clean eatery. The removal of mystery meats and the unchanged oil has gutted the chippy in the South, and I advocate their reintroduction. The North was built on chip butty and meat pie; imagine what the South could do with them if they banded together and set aside, for one moment, the belief that quality is directly proportional to freshness.
