When you say fish to an Englishman, invariably they'll think of cod.
For whilst it's true that there are plenty of other fish in the sea that are just as tasty when battered and served up with chips - such as haddock or plaice - it's cod, with its mild-tasting chunky white flesh, that is the king of fish and it's in cod we trust as a reliable source of nutritional goodness (protein-rich, it also provides heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids and vitamin B-12).
Of course, the Spanish and Portuguese also love their cod - or bacalhau, as the latter call it. But I prefer my fish fresh rather than dried and salted, ta very much. Having said that, it's interesting to note that the English tradition of eating fish deep-fried in oil, probably originated amongst Jewish immigrants from the Iberian Peninsula with a penchant for preparing pescado frito.
As for fish and chip shops, they began opening in London and Oldham in the 1860s and at their peak during the interwar years, there were over 35,000 established across the UK - which means there were a lot of people eating a lot of cod.*
Indeed, fish 'n' chips - sprinkled with salt and vinegar, accompanied by picked onions or mushy peas, and wrapped in newspaper - was an integral aspect not only of working-class cuisine, but working-class culture at this time; as noted by George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937).
Indeed, fish 'n' chips - sprinkled with salt and vinegar, accompanied by picked onions or mushy peas, and wrapped in newspaper - was an integral aspect not only of working-class cuisine, but working-class culture at this time; as noted by George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937).
I don't know if the pre-burger, pre-pizza era was any happier, but it was surely healthier - and slimmer.
*Although there are now only 10,500 fish and chip shops in the UK, they still significantly outnumber other fast food outlets: McDonald's, for example, has 1,200 restaurants and KFC just 840. What's more, according to the National Federation of Fish Friers, 22% of Brits still visit their local fish 'n' chippy at least once a week and annual spend in the UK on fish and chips is in the region of £1.2 billion. Personally, however, I don't much care for the meal and would much rather have grilled swordfish, served with rice and a lime and chilli dressing.
If Nietzsche was right and one can tell something of a man's thinking from what he has for breakfast (and presumably dinner), and how little or much he thinks about it, we're presumably on potentially tasty philosophical ground here - even if some readers might feel we're a long way (three quarters of a century) from George Orwell's socialistic Road to Wigan Pier.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, the cod is a most political (or, more precisely, politicised) fish, regardless of its incidental propensity to delight human taste buds. As the Financial Times reported in a now searingly topical article last year, 'The Brexit Catch for North Sea Cod', stocks of the North Sea fish - after an apparently unexplained spike in the 1960s (named, in a phrase that resembles a discarded Dr Who story, 'The Gadoid Outburst' that presumably had little to do with the Summer of Love happening on dry land) had dwindled to virtual extinction nearly a decade ago owing to over-fishing in British waters. Happily for Stephen's dinner plate, however, and apparently through the collaborative efforts of Scottish fisherman and the EU, who introduced tighter quotas and limited the working activity of fishing vessels, allied to a raft of international treaties between the Norwegians and Brussels, stocks were gradually nursed back to sustainable levels. In 1983, the Common Fishing Policy had divided catches between Norway (who took 17%) and the EU (who swallowed up the remaining 83%, of which the UK took 47%). But, if a week is a long time in politics, 35 years is an eternity, and the shoals of change are shifting once more.
In the teeth of our tattered Brexit - numerous amongst whose original supporters, it appears, were British fishermen still nursing a grievance stemming from the then Prime Minister Edward Heath's tearing up of fishing agreements ratified when the UK joined the EEC in 1973 - more than a few chips are steaming on our frazzled fishermen's shoulders. In the alarmist Daily Mail-esque words of one seafood buyer, Will Clark,
'"we don’t want people to come in willy-nilly and rape and pillage our stocks that we’ve nurtured back to health,” he says, standing on a pier [preusumably not Wigan's - SS] where a late-arriving boat was disgorging boxes of iced cod, much of which would be on dinner plates across Europe by the next day'.
Unfortunately, as Mr Clark points out in an observation that might have delighted Derrida, 'fish have no boundaries' and inconveniently tend to swim across international borders, being too slippery and freedom-loving for the anthropocentric projections of human politics. (A specimen cod might winter in Britain and spawn in summer in Scandinavia's more congenial cooler waters.) And now, as the anxious endgame of Brexit draws to a chaotic close, while some Scottish fisherman may grudgingly concede the EU's enlightened interventions in the market, they are worried about being squeezed by locally decommissioned boats and devalued for their own claimed proactivity in repopulating the sea. Like Oliver Twist, they're asking for more. The Danes are amongst those, it is reported, now steeling themselves for post-Brexit conflict in British fishing waters, as the demand goes in for a 21% increase in the UK share within the UN-recognised 200 mile coastal zone - at the potential expense of themselves, the Netherlands and poisson-munching France. As the scales fall from both Leavers' and Remainers' eyes before the fantastic fiasco of our post-referendum Parliament, and in a move that will presumably please no one, Theresa May, meanwhile, has declared action on the Common Fisheries Policy on ice, in a policy that seems mainly to boil down to 'batter the devil you know'.
STOP PRESS: For those readers can hack hake, its population has increased fivefold since the 1990s (possibly enticed from the Atlantic by warming ocean temperatures, while cod are pushed further north).