Fish and chips started as two separate foods.

The story you've heard

Fish and chips feels as old as the British seaside: hot, salty, soused in vinegar and eaten out of paper on a windy promenade. It is easy to imagine it has always been a single dish, invented in one go somewhere in England.

In fact the two halves have quite separate histories. The fish arrived first, and it came with refugees.

The fish: a Sephardic Sabbath dish

In the 1490s, Jewish people were expelled from Spain and then from Portugal. Many Sephardic Jews, the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula, moved north, and some reached England from the sixteenth century onwards, often by way of Holland. They brought their cooking with them.

One favourite was fish coated in flour or batter and fried in oil. It made perfect sense for the Sabbath, when observant Jews do not cook: fish fried on Friday could be eaten cold the next day, and the coating helped keep it moist. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, drawing on Claudia Roden's Book of Jewish Food, notes that crypto-Jews hiding their faith in Catholic lands also had a reason to fry fish on Fridays, the Church's meatless day.

The dish became well known in England. History Hit points to a 1781 British cookbook describing the Jewish way of preserving fish, and Thomas Jefferson wrote of eating fish in the Jewish fashion after a visit. In 1845 the celebrity chef Alexis Soyer printed a recipe for fried fish, Jewish fashion, noting that it was cooked in oil rather than meat fat.

Onto the streets, and the chips arrive

By the nineteenth century fried fish was a London street food. Charles Dickens mentions a fried fish warehouse in Oliver Twist, published in instalments in 1837 to 1839. History Hit describes sellers hawking pieces from trays hung around their necks.

Chips are harder to pin down. Belgium and France both claim the fried potato. What we do know is that by the mid-1800s fried potatoes were a cheap, filling food in the industrial towns of the north of England, and Dickens again helps: A Tale of Two Cities, from 1859, mentions husky chips of potato fried in a little oil.

Then, in the 1860s, someone had the obvious idea of selling the two together. Two names usually come up. In London, Joseph Malin, a young Ashkenazi Jewish immigrant, opened a shop in the East End around 1860; it is said to have traded until the 1970s. In Lancashire, John Lees ran a wooden hut on Mossley market by 1863, later moving to a shop over the road. Some sources even give Malin's date as 1863.

Who was really first?

Honestly, nobody can be certain. Local historian Rita Vaughan's research, reported by the Tameside Correspondent in 2023, argues that Malin sold only fried fish at first, and that Lees was the first to serve the two together. Census records suggest Lees ran his stall part-time while working in the cotton industry. Oldham's Tommyfield Market, meanwhile, claims to be where chips were first sold, also around 1860.

What both stories agree on is that the combination is Victorian, and that the fish part was already someone else's recipe. Steam trawlers and the new railways then did the rest, bringing cheap fish from the North Sea and beyond to every industrial town. Historic UK notes that shops were often family businesses run from a front room, and by the late 1800s they were everywhere.

On your plate today

Fish and chips became so important that it stayed off the ration list in both world wars, a way of keeping spirits up on the home front. Today there are more than ten thousand fish and chip shops across the UK.

The numbers are still enormous. History Hit, citing industry figures, says Britons buy around 382 million meals from chip shops each year, including about 167 million portions of fish and chips, roughly three helpings for every person in the country. Chip shops are said to sell about a quarter of all the white fish eaten in the UK, and a tenth of all the potatoes. The Friday habit itself has older roots still, in the Christian custom of eating fish rather than meat at the end of the week.

So next Friday, as you shake on the salt, remember the Sephardic families who fried their fish for the Sabbath, and the northern potato fryers who gave it a partner.

Timeline

1. 1490sJews are expelled from Spain and Portugal; some Sephardic families later settle in England.
2. 1781A British cookbook describes the Jewish way of preserving fish.
3. 1837–1839Dickens mentions a fried fish warehouse in Oliver Twist.
4. 1845Alexis Soyer prints a recipe for fried fish, Jewish fashion.
5. c. 1860Joseph Malin opens a fried fish shop in London's East End.
6. 1863John Lees is selling fish and chips from a hut on Mossley market, Lancashire.