As a team, a couple, an item, fish and chips go back a long, long way. Before they got together, the tradition of eating fried fish was well established by the 1830s in London - Dickens mentions fried fish houses in Oliver Twist. It was Jewish people in London who passed on the old technique of coating the fish in flour, then dipping it in egg and breadcrumbs and frying it in oil. The Jews ate the fish cold, and "fried fish in the Jewish fashion" was admired by epicureans, and featured in many English cookbooks in the 19th century.
In 1860 Joseph Malin opened a shop in Bow in the East End of London, selling chips with fried fish, and in the following decades such shops spread like wildfire, and fish-and-chips became one of the staples of the English diet. Cod was the favoured fish in the south of England and haddock was favoured in the north, a tradition which lives on in organisations such as Harry Ramsden's, originally from Yorkshire, where the preferred fish is still haddock.
But the recent story of fish-and-chips has seen the couple in decline. Frozen fish and frozen chips and dull batter have seen the true nature of the dish becoming abused. Fish-and-chips only works when you have fresh fish, the right sort of potato to make the chips, and fresh, clean-tasting oil or beef dripping for frying. Fewer and fewer places seem prepared to put in the work necessary to make the dish correctly, preferring to sell pre-cooked chips and pre-battered fish, all of it delivered in boxes and put straight from freezer into the deep-fat fryer. The nobility of the great couple has been seriously compromised.
The art of making true, proper, fish-and-chips seemed to be irrevocably disappearing with only a few scattered keepers of the flame continuing to battle on. And then along came the Bangor Fish Company.
The Bangor Fish Company, located near the bottom of High Street in the old resort town of Bangor in north Co Down, understands the art, the skill, the thrill of making great fish-and-chips. They do it by means of a simple but logical idea - the quality of their ingredients, sourced from luminary suppliers, is asserted as the essential prelude to making great fish-and-chips. Fast food chains have abandoned the necessity to source quality food; indeed they only source poor-quality foods in order to increase their profit margins. But the Bangor Fish Company does it differently. For a start, they source the three types of fresh fish they offer - haddock, cod and whiting - from McKeown's excellent fish shop, a few doors down the street. They source their beef for burgers and their sausages from George Burns's luminary butcher's shop, at the other end of the town on Abbey Street. The Central Bakery in Bangor makes the baps for their burgers fresh each day, to a formula they specifically requested.
Then, when you come in and finally decide what you want, from the array of fish, vegetarian choices, burgers and hot dogs, mushy peas and filled soda baps, they cook the fish then and there, while you wait with a cup of coffee.
The result of reintroducing quality ingredients and vital supply relationships into the fast-food equation is simple, and deliciously obvious. Extraordinary fish. Amazing chips. Brilliant burgers. Fab sausages. Terrific pasties. Richard Gibson and John Richardson, the partners behind the venture, have thought long and hard about the techniques of sourcing and cooking real fish-and-chips. "We wanted a fish-and-chip shop that we would be able to eat in, but we also wanted to do the things that had been traditionally done. We weren't going to go out and start doing sun-dried tomatoes and chips," says Richard Gibson.
Gibson and Richardson had both run standard fast-food businesses in the past, "`me-too' versions of the big chains," says Gibson. "We realised that these businesses were not food-orientated; they were just a financial equation, a business concept. John then opened a chip shop on the seafront at Bangor called "John Dory" and began to offer more varieties of fish and fresh foods. And we got to know each other, and asked ourselves, `How do we do what we want to do, and pull ourselves away from the normal chippy?' We wanted something that was quality-led, and not just this financial equation."
The sheer quality of the food in the Bangor Fish Company is inspiring. As we sat in the car down at the Bangor marina and scoffed our lunch, the different foods seemed to vie with each other to prove their superiority. Haddock and chips were superlative, the batter on the fish light, fresh and clean, the fish itself perfect. The burger came in a good, substantial bap with crisp onion, lettuce and tomato and salad dressing and was the best burger I have eaten away from home. Almost the best of the lot was a meat pastie, seasoned with loads of black pepper, which I reckon would taste even better after a few pints of beer.
The chips were fabulous, a vindication for all the effort they take, for they had to hunt down Maris Piper potatoes grown in silt in Lancashire to get exactly the quality they wanted. The fact is that what the Bangor Fish Co produces is not fast food, but simply good food. "I suppose what we have done is to take a restaurateur's approach to fast food," says Gibson. "We know exactly what the product is like, and where it is coming from."
The result is the noble art of frying in action, with fresh, high-quality foods, sourced from proven suppliers and treated with respect and care. That old couple - fish-and-chips - have never been in such good hands. The Bangor Fish Company, 20 High Street, Bangor, Co Down, Northern Ireland. Tel: (08 01247) 472172 Open noon3 a.m. Tue-Sat, noon-midnight Sun and Mon.
Frying Tonight At Home
We think of fish-and-chips as the ultimate take-away food, but in fact homemade fish and chips can be sublime, and almost as much fun as sitting with a big bag of steaming food on a seaside wall, in the rain. The recipe which I have found works best and most consistently comes from Anton Mosimann's Fish Cuisine, published in 1988. Accurate temperatures are vitally important to get the fish-and-chips right.
Anton's Fish And Chips
600g (1lb 5oz) white fish (haddock, cod, sole, plaice), skinned and cut into 4 pieces
900g (2lb) potatoes, peeled beef dripping or vegetable oil for deep frying flour for dusting fish, salt, freshly ground pepper
Batter:
110g (4oz) strong plain white flour
80g (3oz) cornflour
1 egg, separated
280ml (9 fl oz) water
pinch each of salt and sugar freshly ground pepper 1 tablespoon parsley, finely chopped
To make the batter: sieve the flour and cornflour into a large bowl. Mix together the egg yolk and the water and incorporate into the flours; beat to a smooth batter. Whisk the egg white until stiff, and fold into the batter. Season with salt, sugar and pepper, and stir in the parsley.
Chip the potatoes to the size and shape you prefer and dry on kitchen towel. Heat the fat in a deep fat fryer to 150C/300F and blanch the chips in it until almost tender. Remove and drain, and heat the oil to 170C/340F.
Season the fish, dust with flour and dip in the batter. Blanch in the hot fat for 2 minutes. Drain, keep warm, and heat the oil to 190C/375F. Refry the chips and then the fish until golden, drain thoroughly on a kitchen towel and serve immediately in newspaper cornets.