There's a recently deceased fish and chip shop at the corner of Whateley Road and Landcroft Road in London SE22. The rubber plants in the window are brown, the post is dusty on the mat and just thinking about the congealed contents of the deep-fat fryer might well make your arteries fur up. So let's not.
The price list of this cheap and, perhaps, once cheerful neighbourhood chip shop is still visible in the gloom. Chips: 70p or 90p a portion. Cod: £1.20 or £1.90. The Golden City also offered the full range of bog-standard dishes - saveloys, battered roe, battered sausage - that would terrify fastidious foreigners. (As historian John K Walton points out in his unexpectedly interesting Fish and Chips and the British Working Class 1870-1940, even though there are strong arguments for the contribution of chip shops to our victory in the first world war, and our avoidance of a Bolshevik-style revolution can substantially be ascribed to the disaffected wartime poor being fed fish and chips, we could never manage to convince the rest of the world of the national dish's amazing virtues. With the possible exceptions of Australia and New Zealand.)
What killed the Golden City? Was it the arrival in significant numbers of Messrs Ladi and Dah to this part of East Dulwich? The snootification of the nearby main drag, Lordship Lane, which now teems with delis, cheese shops and the retail chains that betoken the extension of gentrification's boring remit (Caffè Nero and Nicolas wine)? Or was it high rents? Health fears? The allure of other fast foods? The rise of interest in slow cooking at home? Marks & Spencer's gastropub range of fish and chips that you just slam in the oven, thus obviating the need to go and stand on the corner in a queue of drooling locals? Or was it this summer's hike in commodity prices for potatoes, prompted by shortages as a result of the bad weather, which are making many of Britain's chip shops feel the pinch? Perhaps none of these. "You're lucky it's shut," a passing woman says unprompted as I lurk outside. "Bloody terrible, it was."
The Golden City was a minor casualty in Britain's new fish and chip wars. Today's successful chip shops don't just supply cheap, fast food for the masses. They stress sustainability and freshness - and charge for the privilege. Emblematic of that change is the Battered fish and chip shop in Brewery Place, Leeds, that sells scraps for £2. Scraps were once the leftover fragments of batter, sieved from the beef dripping in the deep pan and either given free to those who couldn't afford fish and chips, or thrown in the bin. Now the co-owner says that scraps have as much potential as garlic doughballs and breadsticks. They are served zested and juiced with lemon, sprinkled with chilli flakes and mixed with rock pepper or nutmeg. No longer is it enough to disinter dubious pieces of cod from freezers where they have been entombed for years and serve them up with limp chips made from ancient potatoes. Britain's chip shops are becoming, if not posh, then posher.
Today, what's more, the successful fish and chip shop has to stress that its fish comes from sustainable sources. New foreign secretary David Miliband recently told Waitrose Food Illustrated magazine that his favourite restaurant is Colman's fish and chips in South Shields. Of course, it's a no-brainer for him to choose a place in his constituency, but his key reason for selecting Colman's is that it offers sustainable haddock.
Indeed, one of the main reasons that the Golden City closed is because an establishment called the Sea Cow opened just a quarter of a mile away in 2003. The Sea Cow represents everything the Golden City was not. It has a wine list. It has a website. Its mushy peas are freshly minted. There are no battered sausages on the menu, but there are moules marinières (when in season), red snapper, gilt-head bream, mahi-mahi and sea bass. It is considerably more expensive than the Golden City (my bill: a glass of wine, £3.75; cod, £6; regular chips, £1; tartare sauce, 50p. Total: £11.75). There's a cabinet at the front of the shop with more outré fresh fish from Billingsgate that you can choose for lunch. One of the Sea Cow's founders, Paul Rigby, says that he would dearly love to take cod off the menu. "At the moment we sell just line-caught cod from sustainable sources in the west English Channel or the North Sea. It's been so overfished around the world, especially in the Atlantic. I really want to change the demand so that people go for haddock instead. It'll take time to educate people's palates."
Educating palates: this isn't what chip shops are supposed to be about. Nor are British chip shops supposed to have staff who know about wine. But when I ask for a glass of wine at the Sea Cow, the man behind the counter pooh-poohs my choice of sauvignon blanc, suggesting that I should have mâcon-villages.
I sip it while I contemplate my adventure into Britain's fish and chips: like a low-budget Morgan Spurlock, I am going to eat them for three days in a row in different restaurants. I don't know if I'm up to the task. The prospect of three big fried lunches makes me wimper with foreboding.
A few minutes later the frier-sommelier brings me lunch. It turns out to be the best meal during my fish and chip marathon. The batter is delicious: thin and yet crispy, the fish beneath succulent. The thick, oblong chips are eloquent rebuttals to the claims of effete, stringy french fries. My one complaint? Not enough capers in the tartare sauce.
"Yeah, we make big efforts over the batter," says Rigby. "I can't stand it when you get batter which is really thick and there's a shrivelled piece of fish inside." What prompted him to get into a seemingly declining fast-food trade? "I set up Sea Cow with my brother Dan after working as an equity trader in the City," he says. Surely there was more money in his old job? "Maybe, but it was soul-destroying, watching people getting fired all the time. So I jacked it in and took some time off to travel." He found himself in Sydney, Australia. "They have great fish bars with the catch of the day spread out on ice. Simple, brilliant food with an accent on freshness. I knew this would work over here. A new spin on an old favourite - that was the idea."
Rigby brought the Aussie chip-shop model to south London, and it worked: bare, communal benches where East Dulwich's upwardly mobile disport themselves decorously over the Sunday papers, unusual and fresh fish brought in daily from Billingsgate on display and no ancient saveloys to spoil the clean and cheerful vibe. Business is booming and from September, Sea Cow's scooters will do battle with pizza-delivery boys for mastery of home-delivered fast food in south-east London.
Now the Rigbys are diversifying. "We're focusing more on catering for summer festivals. We did great business at Glastonbury recently and this weekend we've got the trailer at a festival in Southwold."
But that isn't all. Rigby is hoping to make money from old chip fat by converting it into biodiesel. "What happens otherwise is that drains get clogged with hardening oil," he says. "That's become quite a problem in London. It's ever such a simple process to convert it to diesel fuel and then we can sell it on as fuel for vehicles or domestic heating."
I finish the wine and get to my feet. Fish and chips at lunchtime is not for wimps. Did gravity just get heavier? I start walking up Lordship Lane towards Dulwich Picture Gallery, where I hope to see an exhibition of portraits from the Uffizi, but something is pulling me back. Eventually I make it to my destination and sit in front of one of my favourite paintings, Poussin's Rinaldo and Armida, and doze. Who can eat such a solid meal for lunch and expect to do anything afterwards?
Surely something very wrong is happening to British fish and chip shops. They aren't supposed to be for snooty aesthetes. Historically, they provided fuel for Britain's working classes - cheap food for the poor that was regarded by the medical authorities as terribly unhealthy (the link between enteric fever and fried fish was regularly stressed) and not the sort of thing decent people would eat. For example, when, in her 1921 novel, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Dorothy L Sayers sent the monocle-wearing sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, out for a fish and chip supper after a visit to a "plebeian" music hall, there were, as Walton suggests, "strong overtones of recreational slumming about the episode".
For the non-monocle-wearing classes, fish and chips was never about recreational slumming. Sometimes it was a treat, but more importantly it was about survival. Walton reports that in 1935 a deputation of fish-friers told the Sea Fish Commission that they were selling depression-hit families in Sunderland fish and chips at pre-first world war prices, because that was all customers could afford. Incredibly, they made a profit because, even though their margins were slashed, their loyalty base was made strong by this gesture. "The fish-friers of north-eastern England, and, for example, in Glasgow," writes Walton, "helped keep starvation and despair at bay in these depressed years."
By then, fish and chips was Britain's national dish, and remained so until chicken tikka masala pressed its competing charms. Walton writes: "The convivial, open, public nature of the purchase and often the eating of fish and chips also enables it to be appropriated in support of cosy visions of democratic solidarity, of a kind that transcends divisions of class or status."
When did fish and chips begin its assault on British palates? Dickens' Oliver Twist refers to "fried fish warehouses", the precursors of fish and chip shops. Given that the novel was serialised in the late 1830s, this suggests that fried fish had a foothold in Britain before Victoria's regal bottom settled on to the throne for its protracted stay. Some suggest chips were first fried in Manchester and that fish was first fried in London. When the two had their first fateful tryst on a plate is much discussed, but there are few certainties. That said, the first British fish and chip shop is thought to have opened at Mossley, near Oldham, in 1863, though some sources claim a London chip shop opened in 1860.
By the start of the 20th century there was reportedly a chip shop every 400 metres in Oldham and Leeds. But this density was frowned upon: the reliance of working people on fast-food was thought to be dangerous to family coherence and gave women a chance to evade at least one of their presumed domestic duties. Even in the late 20th century, fish and chips was regarded as pernicious. "The notion that fish and chips is part of a way of life that is downright immoral, subverting the basic values of home and family, still finds expression in ministerial pronouncements as well as in the editorial 'common sense' of rightwing magazines," reckoned Walton, writing in 1992.
No matter. Last year, more than 250 million meals were sold from fish and chip shops throughout the UK, and on Fridays 20% of meals bought outside the home are from a fish and chip shop. The industry may not have the chokehold it once had on this fast-food nation, but it is hardly on the skids.
Day two: I'm heading to Whitby on North Yorkshire's coast to interview Stuart Fusco, Young Fish Fryer of the year in 2004-05. In Whitby, every other shop seems to sell fish and chips. There is a token juice bar whose name - Pulp Kitchen - with all due respect, could do with a makeover. How many chip shops are there in Whitby, I ask the staff at the tourist information office. "Oooh, hundreds," says one. "About 50," says another. Actually, there seem to be about 20, but the list the office provides me with is, they admit, hardly exhaustive. "They open and close all the time."
"Fish and chips is big business here," says Fusco, 31. "People will drive two and a half hours from Manchester or Liverpool to come to Whitby for fish and chips, a bit of a stroll and then home," he says. "That's changed the trade. Whitby used to have to rely on holidaymakers, the 20 or 30 people who stayed overnight, or locals. The challenge is always to keep up with these changes."
I sit on a bench overlooking Whitby harbour with my haddock and chips from Fusco's Quayside restaurant. My bill: chips, £1.20; haddock, £3.60; Fanta, 80p; mushy peas, 50p. Total: £6.10. It is served in a posh box: even in traditional Whitby, it proves impossible to get fish and chips wrapped in newspaper.
I'm surrounded by other alfresco diners, hunched in intimate communion with their lunch as drizzle blows in off the sea. We're slightly outnumbered by burly seagulls, any one of whom looks as if it might treat me like Tippi Hedren. I bite into the battered fish: it takes seconds before I get through to fish. Not that I'm complaining: I kind of like my batter to look like a relief map of the North Yorkshire Moors. The chips, amazing to relate, are not rectilinear. But more about them later.
After lunch, I climb the hill to the Captain Cook monument. Then I walk the 199 steps up to the beautiful ruins of Whitby Abbey. Interestingly, even though my lunch was as big as the one I had at the Sea Cow, these twin ascents above Whitby prove less strenuous than my walk to Dulwich Picture gallery. The probable reason? In Whitby, I drank a can of Fanta rather than mâcon-villages. Either that or my body is recalibrating itself in the face of this barmy new dietary regime.
After the lunchtime trade dies down, I interview Fusco. He comes from a fish and chip dynasty. Forty odd years ago the Fuscos came to Whitby from nearby Pickering on the Yorkshire moors and built up a hard-won reputation on the coast. His family is originally Italian - one of those ethnic groups (others include Cypriots, Chinese and, many years ago, Jews) that specialised in selling fish and chips to Britons.
"I've been frying for my dad since the age of 13," says Fusco. "I never thought this is what I'd end up doing. When I went away to do my degree in geography and environmental sciences, I realised that this is what I wanted to do."
He reckons to work 80 to 90 hours a week. "It's partly a social thing. A lot of the staff are young and we all socialise a lot together after work." There is life after work? "Sometimes it doesn't feel like that. You have to put the hours in, though. The business is there if you work at it, especially in the summer." What about the price rises for potatoes? "These things are always up and down. The important things for us are understanding the psychology and needs of our demographic. That's why we do well."
His dad now runs the Royal Fisheries chip shop in town, while Stuart's restaurant is on the harbour. The latter consists of a Les Routiers-award-winning cafe upstairs, and downstairs a takeaway counter and a sit-down restaurant.
What is your unique selling point? "Crinkle-cut chips," says Fusco."I think I'm right in saying we're the only fish and chip shop in northern England that uses them. They crisp better because more surface area is exposed, you see." Do questions of sustainability bother you? "Absolutely. We get all our fish from fishing grounds that have quotas and are considered sustainable sources." What about selling cod? "We tried in the past to give it up and it hasn't worked. It's psychological. When people stopped fishing herring, there was an outcry because it was such a staple food. Now herring supplies are ample but nobody wants to eat them. You have to give people what they want." Is all your fish fresh? "Most of it is. I don't really believe those who would tell you all their fish is. We use some frozen." Why did he win the young fish-fryer award? "I'm passionate about what I do. There are plenty of people who aren't. You need to be passionate about fish and chips because the competition is so fierce. But those kind of fly-by-nights don't last long."
I return to my hotel room for a lie-down. Around 7pm, the charms of the town's chip pans waft through my open windows. Call it ancestral longing for fried fish, call it a death wish, but for a moment I think of scampering downstairs for another portion. Thankfully, I can barely lift myself off the bed.
Day three: I'm on the train from Whitby to Guiseley near Leeds. In 1928, the first Harry Ramsden's was opened in Guiseley and I've decided to visit. Harry Ramsden's bucks the trend: fish and chips shops are mostly family concerns, rarely multiples.
But, even though I've had nothing to eat for 24 hours, I'm not keen. Both Rigby and Fusco tell me they only manage two portions of fish and chips a week - and Fusco says at least one of those meals will be an oily fish such as herring, mackerel or sardines that contain omega-3 fatty acids, helpful for reducing cholesterol levels.
In need of moral support, I ring former lion tamer Albert Stokes, 95, who, for the past 25 years, has eaten haddock and chips from Peter's in Margate nearly every day. Has this diet contributed to his longevity? "I'm sure it has," says Stokes, a widower. "That and the pint of Guinness I usually have with my meal." But how can he eat it every day - after only two consecutive days, my spirits are flagging? "It's good solid simple food," says Stokes, who used to throw knives at his wife as part of a circus act. "I don't think it's done me any harm. I only weigh 10 stone - it's not as though it's made me obese or unhealthy."
In this opinion, Stokes receives support from the Sea Fish Industry Authority, which points out that fish and chips have a third fewer calories than other popular takeaways such as kebabs and chicken kormas, and represents 33% of a woman's recommended calorie intake and 23% of a man's. "It has a massive 42% less fat than a doner kebab and a third less than a Whopper Meal from Burger King," says the authority. Though massively more, presumably, than my usual lunch of an apple and rice cakes.
Steeled by Stokes's words, I settle down in Harry Ramsden's first restaurant. It is located unglamorously on a roundabout on the outskirts of Guiseley. It offers genteel suburban dining: there are chandeliers and panelled walls, crisply attired waitresses, and an ambience recalling Beefeater restaurants of yore that would have made me run screaming into the west Yorkshire traffic were I not being paid to sample what's on offer. "Will you get the batter of Harry's challenge?" asks the menu. "Or will it get the batter of you?" Apparently, if I eat a "legendary" whole giant cod or haddock fillet, along with large chips and mushy peas, garden peas or baked beans, and pay £10.99, I will be presented with a signed certificate.
Instead, I order a small portion. My bill: haddock fillet (presumably including chips and two slices of unsolicited bread and butter), £7.49; mushy peas, 99p; a pot of tea, £1.49. Total: £9.97. What was it like? Contrary to expectations, I clear my plate. Do I detect Harry's "unique secret batter" that guarantees "that distinctive Harry Ramsden's flavour - a flavour that's revered the world over"? Frankly, no. It is as functional and bland as the roundabout outside.
On the train back to Leeds, I read in the paper about Battered, the yuppie Yorkshire eaterie selling scraps for £2, and decide to visit before I go home. My stomach is leaden as I walk through Leeds: it's been Sea Cowed, Whitbyed and now Harry Ramsdened. It's not in the mood to be Battered. I ask directions. "The place where they charge for scraps?" says a passerby. "Don't bother. You can get them free at Graveley's on Ludgate Hill." She leaves me standing in the street and I realise that I don't want scraps, free or yuppified. I want to go home and never see, let alone eat, anything in batter again. So I do.
'Delightful interplay of crunch and chew'
Anyone for scraps with chilli and paprika?
Leeds's first dedicated gourmet fish and chip shop has caused quite a stir in West Yorkshire because, to the indignation of certain diners, it charges £2 a time for a bowl of scraps that would normally be free from the local chippy.
But these aren't your common or garden afterthought. At Battered, they're cooked fresh, to order, and served as a delicacy in their own right. Head chef Robert Charnley's menu offers three flavours: black pepper with rock salt and lemon; chilli with lime and paprika; and Duvelle beer with a hint of lemon.
The black pepper and rock salt scraps have a real bite to them, even if it isn't immediately obvious. It takes a few moments to decipher the flavours but they certainly have a kick.
Far more vague is the beer - Duvelle or not, it's barely detectable next to the beef dripping they're cooked in. It's still a pleasant enough taste but hardly a big departure from your conventional batter.
In total contrast is the chilli offering, which on first tasting barely registers, but within a few seconds has your tongue tingling in a way only chilli can. Here the beef dripping crumbles in the face of such flavour. Outstanding.
Sure, they aren't the most imaginative or exotic of flavourings but combined with the taste of the dripping, the texture of the batter and that delightful interplay between the crunch and chew, most of them make for a novel experience. Are they worth a separate menu billing? Certainly, and for £2 what have you got to lose?
It seems an injustice to call these scraps at all, so far removed are they from their smaller, blander cousins. But since this is Leeds they'll always be known as scraps, even though there's nothing scrappy about them.
Rod McPhee
· Battered, 5a Brewery Place, Leeds, LS10 1NE. Tel 0113 2435761. batteredfish.co.uk.
· Rod McPhee is the food critic of the Yorkshire Evening Post
