I’m conducting a life-long study of fish & chips. Not, like, every day. That would be excessive. It would kill you. Or me. But there is something rather special and unique and comforting about one of probably only 3 totally British meals. The other 2 being roast beef with Yorkshire pudding and chicken tikka massala. I don’t count jellied eels because the very thought makes me wretch.

Fish is good for you. Though cover it in heavy batter and fry it in beef fat and it probably loses just a touch of that ‘goodness’. Just a touch. Chips are the devil’s work. And all the better for it.

So every few months we’ll get a take-away (because if you eat in you will smell like fried cod for a week) from our local, the Poseiden in East Finchley. Which is wonderful. Not cheap, but really, consistently fantastic. Cooked by a Greek man who had the sense to leave his homeland 25 years before ‘the trouble’.

But when you go to the British seaside its a legal requirement to eat fish’n’chips. Has to be done. You can get all varieties. From stands on the beach, in little cardboard boxes, to up-market Rick Steineries in Padstow. Also served in cardboard boxes, but his ones are ironic. Which you can tell because you’re paying a tenner more for the irony.

And in Whitby last week, which is first and foremost a fishing village, we ate at The Magpie. Widely regarded, though there’s always debate, as ‘the best in town’.

The connection between the seaside and this meal is fairly obvious really. Haddock doesn’t (as I recently learned) grow on trees, but instead swims in the sea. Until some Yorkshireman with a boat, a flat cap and net rips it gasping out of the sea, away from its family and murders it…

Ok, that’s vegan talk. We know why fish are caught.

Basically, so I can eat them.

If you start with really fresh fish, as The Magpie does, as Rick Stein obviously does (his restaurant gets wet at high tide; almost) and as the Poseiden in land-locked East Finchley does, and batter it lightly and fry it really well, you have fish’n’chip perfection. Not greasy, not slimy, great chips, all is good in the land.

But is there a difference between Rick Stein, the Magpie in Whitby and any of the really good fishy places in London? Or Leeds? Or Birmingham? Because it doesn’t take very long to get fish around the country and basically, fish is fish. So its all in the cooking, and the batter. And by now, most people know how to do that. And they all know how everyone else does it too. There are no secrets because even the Rick Steins of this world pride themselves on cooking it ‘the old way’, ‘the proper way’. And it ain’t rocket science. No lettuce at all allowed in fish’n’chips.

So I’ll keep on trying out fish’n’chipperies in far away places in the UK. To see if there really is any difference. Or whether next year we should just holiday in East Finchley and save the petrol.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx