The History of Fish and Chips — The British Food That Was Never British

6. 1944. Normandy, France. 2 in the morning. A British paratrooper has just landed in occupied territory. He's behind enemy lines. It's pitch dark. He cannot see who is around him. He cannot use a light. He cannot fire blindly into the darkness and hope for the best. So he calls out a single word. Fish. He waits. From somewhere in the darkness, a voice comes back. Chips. He is safe. On the most consequential night in modern history, the night the Allied invasion of Normandy begins, the British military has chosen, as its frontline password, the name of a takeaway meal. Two words that every British soldier knows instinctively. Two words so unmistakably, so completely British, that military planners were confident no German soldier could produce them naturally, in the dark, under pressure, without hesitation. They were right. It worked. But here is what those men in that field could not have known. Those two words, fish and chips, were not British in origin at all. The dish they were using to find each other in the dark had been put together by a Jewish immigrant teenager in the east end of London, using a recipe carried to England by families fleeing religious persecution three centuries earlier, most likely combined with a potato tradition brought over by Protestant refugees from France. A refugee recipe. A password. And between those two things, about 300 years of history that almost nobody knows. This is the story of fish and chips. And almost none of it is what most people think. Before we go back to where this story really begins, which is not England, and not the 19th century, I want to know, where in the world are you watching this? Drop your city or country in the comments. I'm genuinely curious how far this one travels. Now, the beginning. It does not start in a chip shop. It starts with an expulsion. For several centuries, the Iberian Peninsula, what is now Spain and Portugal, was home to one of medieval Europe's most diverse civilizations. Under Moorish rule, Jews, Muslims, and Christians coexisted in the same cities, often in the same neighborhoods. It was not without tension, and it was not without discrimination. But Sephardic Jews, as this community came to be known, were woven into the fabric of Iberian society. They practiced medicine. They served in royal courts. They traded across the Mediterranean. And like every community shaped by religious practice, they had a food culture built around their faith. One of the requirements of that faith was this, no cooking on the Sabbath. The Jewish Sabbath begins at sundown on Friday and runs through Saturday evening. No fire, no food preparation, which created a very practical problem for a community that still needed to eat on Saturday. The solution, developed and refined over generations, was to cook on Friday what could be eaten cold the next day. And one dish worked particularly well for this, white fish, typically cod or haddock, coated in flour and fried in oil. It tasted good cold, and it could be prepared in quantity before the Sabbath began. The dish was known, in various forms across Iberian dialects, as pescado frito, fried fish. Then in 1492, Spain expelled its Jewish population entirely. Portugal followed with its own forced conversions and expulsions in 1497. Centuries of coexistence ended within a generation. Families who had lived in those lands for centuries were given a choice, convert, leave, or die. Many converted publicly while continuing to practice in secret. Many fled. Some went to the Netherlands. And over time, a significant number made their way to England. They brought almost nothing with them, but they brought their cooking. In London, particularly in the East End, which would become for the next several centuries the primary landing zone for wave after wave of arriving immigrants, these Sephardic Jewish families began frying fish the way they always had, in flour, in oil, on Fridays. And the neighbors noticed. The smell alone was advertisement enough. The fish began to be sold from trays, then from stalls, then from dedicated shops. By the early 19th century, fried fish sold in what contemporaries called the Jewish fashion was a recognized street food in London. It had crossed over. It was no longer simply a community's internal tradition. In 1845, a prominent chef named Alexis Sawyer included a recipe for it in a widely read cookbook aimed at working-class readers, and he labeled it plainly, fried fish, Jewish fashion. He was not being exotic. He was being accurate. When Charles Dickens published Oliver Twist in the late 1830s, he referenced fried fish warehouses in London as though they were already as familiar as any other shop on the street, which, by then, they more or less were. The fish half of what would become Britain's national dish had been sitting in London for 200 years, brought by refugees, adopted by a city, waiting for a partner. The origin of the chip is considerably murkier, and it is worth being honest about that, because the competing stories reveal something interesting about how nations tend to think about their food. The most widely repeated account places the invention in Belgium, in the winter of 1680, in the region around the river Meuse. The river froze, fishing became impossible, and according to the story, which has the feeling of a folk legend more than a documented fact, families began cutting potatoes into strips, the shape of small fish, and frying them as a substitute. Historians note that this account, while plausible, cannot be verified from contemporary primary sources. It may be true. It may be an origin myth. The honest answer is that nobody knows for certain. The French dispute the Belgian claim. They have their own candidates. The British have occasionally staked their own claims. The exact origin of the fried potato chip remains genuinely unresolved. What is somewhat clearer, is how the habit of frying potatoes reached Britain. French Protestants, Huguenots, fleeing religious persecution in France, during the 17th century, settled in England in large numbers. Many ended up in the east end of London. They brought their culinary habits with them. Whether they were the primary route by which fried potatoes entered British food culture is debated, but historians, including Panikos Panayi, who has written the most thorough academic history of fish and chips, have noted the Huguenot presence as part of the picture. What is not debated, is that by the mid-19th century, fried potatoes were being sold as street food in both London and the industrial towns of northern England. So there it was. Fried fish, from Sephardic Jewish refugees. Fried potatoes, most likely arriving with Protestant refugees from France. Both being sold on the streets of the same city, for decades, in parallel, without anyone apparently thinking to put them together. Until, according to the most widely cited account, a 13-year-old boy did. Around 1860, in the east end of London, a family named Malin, descended from those Sephardic Jewish immigrants, working as carpet weavers, were selling chips from their home. Their son Joseph, began combining the two. The family opened what became the first recorded fish and chip shop in the east end, in the area around Bow. The precise date and exact circumstances are not documented in contemporary records. The 1860 date comes from later accounts, and historians treat it as approximate. What does appear to be true, is that the shop operated for a remarkably long time, reportedly remaining open until the 1970s. There is a credible competing claim from the north of England. Around 1863, a man named John Lees, was selling fish and chips from a wooden hut in Mossley Market in Lancashire. A commemorative blue plaque marks the Tommyfield Market site in nearby Oldham today. Historians, who have examined both claims, generally treat them as genuinely unresolved. The north versus south debate, over which region can claim the first fish and chip shop, has a certain entertaining quality to it. But the honest answer, is that no definitive primary source, settles it either way. What is not in dispute, is what happened after. Whether the credit belongs to Joseph Malin in London, or John Lees in Lancashire, what they had created, independently, or nearly so, was something Britain had never quite had before. A cheap, hot, portable, filling meal, with no table required, no cutlery needed, no ceremony of any kind. You walked up, you paid a few pennies, you walked away with dinner. For a factory worker finishing a long shift in an industrial city, it was precisely what the moment called for. And the moment was enormous. The Industrial Revolution had uprooted millions of people from rural communities, where food was grown nearby and cooked at home, and deposited them in cramped urban neighborhoods, where there was no garden, often barely a kitchen, and never enough time. These people needed feeding. The chip shop fed them. And what made the chip shop possible on a national scale, was technology that had nothing to do with food at all. The railway. Before steam trains, fresh seafish was effectively unavailable to anyone living far from the coast. It would spoil in transit. The fishing ports on Britain's east coast, Grimsby, Hull, Fleetwood, might produce extraordinary quantities of cod, but none of it reached Manchester, or Leeds, or Birmingham, in any edible condition. The railway changed this completely. By the mid-19th century, fresh North Sea cod could travel from a fishing port to an inland city in a matter of hours. Suddenly, chip shops far from the sea could offer genuinely fresh fish at a price that working-class customers could afford. The combination of fresh cod, fried potatoes, and industrial-era demand produced something close to a feeding revolution. By 1910, there were more than 25,000 fish and chip shops operating across the United Kingdom. That number is worth sitting with for a moment. More than 25,000 shops, selling essentially one thing, 50 years after the dish was first combined. The growth was not the result of a corporation, or a franchise, or a marketing campaign. It spread because it worked. Because it was cheap, and filling, and available, and fast. Because it was, for millions of people, the most reliable hot meal in their week. And those shops were being run, across those decades, by immigrants. Jewish families dominated the London trade for decades. By 1933, Jewish-owned shops accounted for 148 fish and chip shops in London alone. Italian immigrants built the trade in Scotland and Ireland, arriving from poor rural communities in central Italy, between roughly 1890 and 1914. Finding in the chip shop a business whose demands — long hours, physical labor, consistent production — matched what they were willing to give. In Dublin, a survey of chip shops conducted in 1909 found most were operated by Italian immigrant families. One frequently cited founding figure in Ireland is Giuseppe Servi, an Italian immigrant who reportedly established an early fish-and-chip operation in Dublin in the 1880s, though the details of his story have taken on some legendary quality in the retelling. After the Second World War, Greek Cypriots moved into the trade in large numbers across England. In Leicester, the historian Panakos Panayi, himself of Greek-Cypriot background, found that despite the small size of the Cypriot community in the city, an overwhelming proportion of the chip shops were owned by Cypriot families. The pattern was consistent, and it was national. Each arriving community found in the chip shop what the previous one had found — a business that was accessible, demanding, and planted at the center of British working life. Meanwhile, the dish was being absorbed so completely into British culture that people were starting to forget — or simply stop noticing — that it had ever come from anywhere else. Early chip shops had faced genuine resistance. Social reformers in the late Victorian era wrote about them as dirty and unsanitary. The frying smell was treated as a working-class nuisance. But as the shops multiplied and the railway made fresh fish available everywhere, the middle class gradually came around. By the 1920s, when new and more powerful fishing vessels dramatically increased the supply of North Sea cod, the price dropped further, and the dish reached into still higher social strata. By the 1930s, fish and chips appeared not only in chip shops but in workplace canteens, boarding houses, and hotel dining rooms. The dish had traveled, in under a century, from immigrant street food to something approaching a national institution. Then the world went to war again, and the British government made a decision about fish and chips that revealed, more clearly than anything else, exactly how important the dish had become. When the First World War began in 1914, rationing was introduced for a range of staples, including bread, sugar, and meat. The government had to determine which foods were simply too important to restrict. Fish and chips made that list, and not for sentimental reasons. The reasoning, as historians including John Walton have documented, was coldly practical. The cabinet understood that the homefront would not hold if working people lost the one affordable, reliable, hot meal that kept daily life functioning. Historian Walton has written that the government knew it was vital to keep families on the homefront in good heart, and noted the contrast with Germany, whose deteriorating food supply contributed to homefront instability. Fish and chips stayed off the ration list throughout the First World War. The same decision was made when the Second World War began, under considerably more difficult circumstances. German submarines were targeting British fishing vessels. Many trawlers had been requisitioned by the Royal Navy. Those still fishing did so under constant threat. Fish prices rose sharply enough that the government intervened to control them in 1941. The fat available for By some accounts, the fish and chips available during the war years were measurably worse than what people had been eating in peacetime. People still queued for it. Churchill described the ingredients as the good companions, a phrase widely attributed to him, though the exact context and wording varies across sources, and historians treat it more as a paraphrase of his sentiment than a precise quotation. More precisely documented is a statement from Lord Walton, who served as Minister of Food during the war, and whose view of the matter was explicit. The maintenance of fish and chips in wartime was considered essential to wartime morale. Not popular. Not desirable. Essential. The language of policy, not affection. And so the dish that had arrived in Britain on the backs of refugees, fried in the tradition of families fleeing the Inquisition, combined by the son of immigrant carpet weavers, spread across the country by successive waves of Italian, and Jewish, and later Greek Cypriot shop owners, had become, officially, an instrument of British national survival. Which makes the shadow side of this story harder to look at, because at the same moment the British government was declaring fish and chips essential to national morale, some of the families who had built that industry were being classified as the enemy. When Italy entered the war on Germany's side in June 1940, the British government rounded up Italian nationals living in Britain, and interned many of them as enemy aliens. The policy was sweeping, and largely indiscriminate. It did not meaningfully distinguish between politically active fascist sympathizers, and men who had spent 30 years running chip shops in Edinburgh or Glasgow. Families who had been feeding working-class Britain through the Depression, who had British-born children, who had built their entire lives in Britain, were interned on the basis of their Italian citizenship. The most devastating consequence came in July 1940. A ship called the SS Arendora Star, carrying German and Italian internees from Britain across the Atlantic, was torpedoed by a German submarine. More than 800 people died. Among the dead were Italian civilians, including men who had been taken from their cafes and chip shops in British cities, and placed on that ship with no meaningful process of appeal. The Arendora Star disaster is documented historical fact. It prompted significant public debate in Britain at the time, and the internment policy was subsequently reviewed and partially reversed. Some families returned to their shops. Others had lost everything. Britain moved on. The chip shops reopened, and the story that settled around fish and chips in the post-war decades made no particular room for what had happened to the Italians who built it in Scotland and Ireland. By the 1950s, with somewhere around 35,000 shops at their peak, fish and chips had acquired a cultural presence that felt permanent and ancient, as though it had always been there. The National Federation of Fish Fryers marketed it as Britain's favorite food. Headlines called it patriotic. Politicians began eating it in public as a kind of performance, an argument conducted through a paper parcel and a wooden fork, that they understood the country and its people. The chip shop had become a prop in a particular kind of political theater. The immigrants still running most of those shops were not part of the story being told. Greek Cypriots. Chinese families. South Asian families. Generation after generation of newcomers who had found in the chip shop what every generation before them had found. They were doing the work. They were largely invisible in the mythology. Then, in 2004, a historian named Panikos Panayi, a professor of European history at De Montfort University in Leicester, and himself, the descendant of Greek Cypriot immigrants, published research making explicit what food historians had long understood, that fried fish in Britain was Jewish in origin and that the chip tradition was most likely French. The finding was not new within academic circles, but when it reached the wider press, Panayi found himself listed on an extreme right-wing website under the heading, Know Your Enemy. The man being identified as an enemy of British culture was a British professor whose own community had spent decades operating chip shops across Britain. The food being defended as native and pure was a refugee recipe built by immigrant labor across five centuries. The irony was complete and the logic was incoherent, but the irony was also, in its way, very old. It had been there since the beginning. And then came the Cod Wars, which exposed something else entirely, not about who the dish belonged to, but about how fragile its foundations actually were. Between the late 1950s and the mid-1970s, Britain and Iceland fought a series of confrontations over fishing rights in the North Atlantic that historians have called the Cod Wars. There were no declarations of war and no military strikes, but there were genuine confrontations at sea. Icelandic Coast Guard vessels using net cutters against British trawlers, Royal Navy ships deployed to protect the fishing fleet, and ramming incidents that caused real damage. Two NATO allies came closer to actual armed conflict than anyone in Brussels was comfortable admitting. The root of it was overfishing. British trawler fleets had pushed progressively further into the North Atlantic as stocks closer to home declined, a decline that Britain's own fishing practices had substantially caused. Iceland, whose economy depended almost entirely on its fishing waters, extended its territorial fishing limits in stages to 12 miles in 1958, to 50 miles in 1972, and to 200 miles in 1975. Britain refused to recognize each extension and sent vessels to fish anyway. The confrontations that followed were the result. Iceland won every time. A small island nation with no meaningful navy and a population smaller than many British cities prevailed in every round against one of the world's significant powers. Britain conceded the 200-mile exclusion zone in 1976. British deep-sea trawling in Icelandic waters effectively ended. The consequences for fish and chips were severe and lasting. North Sea cod stocks, which had been around 250,000 tons in the 1970s, declined sharply through the 1980s and 1990s, reaching a historic low of around 37,400 tons in 2007, according to fisheries data. Conservation measures produced some recovery, but stocks never returned to historical levels. The cod that had been the foundation of the chip shop trade—the fish that the government had called essential, the fish soldiers had used as a password on D-Day—had been severely depleted. The industry that depended on it contracted accordingly. By 2009, the number of fish in chip shops had fallen from the 35,000 peak to approximately 10,000. The dish survived, but the comfortable idea that it was self-sustaining, rooted, and independent of the wider world did not. And then 2022 arrived, and a war in Ukraine made that dependency visible in a way that could not be talked around. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February of that year, and Western sanctions followed, fish and chip shop owners across Britain began finding their Russia had been supplying, according to the National Federation of Fish Fryers, somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the cod and haddock sold in British chip shops. At the same time, Ukraine, which is among the world's leading exporters of sunflower oil, widely used in commercial frying, was at war. Energy prices were rising steeply. Andrew Crook, then-president of the National Federation of Fish Fryers, told reporters that as many as 3,000 shops could be forced out of business within months. The dish that had been declared untouchable in two world wars. The dish that had outlasted the fast food revolution and the collapse of the North Sea cod stock. The dish that politicians had photographed themselves eating as a symbol of grounded, resilient, essentially British life. That dish was dependent on Russian fish and Ukrainian oil. And there was nothing particularly surprising about that, except that the story Britain had been telling about fish and chips had made it seem surprising. The dish had always depended on the world beyond Britain's borders. That was true from the first Friday a Sephardic Jewish family fried fish in flour and oil on a London street. It was true when Huguenots arrived, with their potato traditions. It was true when Italian immigrants walked into Scottish high streets and opened chip shops. It was true when Greek Cypriots built the trade in the English Midlands. It was true when Iceland's waters provided the cod after Britain exhausted its own. It was never a closed, self-contained, purely local thing. It was always a product of movement. So go back to Normandy. Back to the dark field. Back to the two words called into the night. The reason that password worked is that every British soldier instantly knew it. Fish and chips lived in them the way only things from childhood do. The smell of it on a Friday evening. The weight of the paper in your hands. The vinegar soaking through. These were not cultural references. They were memories. Visceral and immediate and completely real. And those memories had a history that stretched back to families who had been told, repeatedly and violently, that they were not welcome wherever they went. The recipe in that password had been carried across Europe by people expelled from Spain and Portugal. The shops those soldiers had grown up going to had been built by Italians who were interned as enemy aliens, by Jewish families whose origins in the dish were later used as grounds for listing a historian as an enemy. The fish in the recipe had been nearly destroyed by the nation that claimed it as its symbol. And the dish was being sustained, in 1944 and ever since, by people whose faces and names did not appear in the version of the story that Britain preferred to tell about itself. Fish and chips is not a simple thing. It never was. It is a dish assembled across centuries from the cooking traditions of people who were fleeing something. Persecution. Poverty. Famine. Accident. War. Each of them found something in Britain. A place to land. A trade to enter. A way to feed people and be paid for it. And what they left behind – the recipe, the shop, the ritual of Friday evening – was so good, so useful, so genuinely loved, that it became something the country wanted to claim as entirely its own. That is, in the end, both the irony and the tribute. The dish became British not despite its immigrant origins, but through them. It became the national dish, because every group that ever made it put something of themselves into it, and then quietly stepped back, as Britain wrapped it in a flag and called it native. The next time someone unwraps a portion of fish and chips – the steam, the salt, the vinegar – they are holding about 500 years of people on the move. 500 years of someone arriving somewhere new with almost nothing, finding a way to feed people, and leaving behind something that outlasted everything else about their time there. That is what it is. That is what it was always built on. And now you know.