[BITList] Down with fish and chips, the most disgusting meal on Earth | Life and style | The Guardian

[John Feltham]

> http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/feb/18/down-with-fish-chips-most-disgusting-meal?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+main+NEW+H&utm_term=157541&subid=5050029&CMP=EMCNEWEML6619I2 <http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/feb/18/down-with-fish-chips-most-disgusting-meal?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+main+NEW+H&utm_term=157541&subid=5050029&CMP=EMCNEWEML6619I2>
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> Down with fish and chips, the most disgusting meal on Earth
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> At last, it seems that fish and chips has had its chips. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has released data from its study into the nation’s food habits <http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/feb/18/goodbye-fish-chips-national-food-survey-changing-trends-british-dining> that reveals the number of us ordering a portion of battered haddock from our local chippy more than halved between 1974 and 2014.
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> This comes as no surprise to me. I grew up with fish and chips. I’m Greek Cypriot: my people’s cultural heritage is 10% trying to take credit for democracy and 90% claiming the battering and frying of marine creatures. Hell, my yia-yia (gran to you) showed me how to flour and batter a haddock while I was in kindergarten. During school summer holidays, my uncle Tony would regale me with the progress of the permanent athlete’s foot he had developed from the heat of the deep-fat fryers seeping up through the floor tiles. Good times.
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> I couldn’t be more pleased about the apparent decline of the nation’s “favourite” tea. It is a dreadful, dreadful meal. Fish <http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/fish> is delicious. Light, delicate, subtle: all it needs is a sprinkle of salt and a squeeze of lemon. What do chippies do with it? Encase it in a sarcophagus of artery-hardening stooge that replaces its natural flavour with a taste you could get by glugging back a bottle of cooking oil.
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> As a meal, it’s a conceptual disaster. There’s one flavour: grease. There’s one texture: mush. In an era where even the most basic cook knows that you need to serve something sharp with fatty food to cut through the oil, what do we serve with our fish? Something light and sharp? Something zingy to counteract the grease-heavy assault on the palate? Nope. It’s chips. Oil-sodden chips, fried into a mushy, cottony pulp. Go to a bad chippy and it’s hard to tell whether you’re eating food or a duvet and pillow set that has been sliced up and lobbed into the deep-fat fryer.
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> You know there’s something wrong with a meal when the best bit is a family of side dishes that feel as though they belong in a museum. Pickled eggs: the most futile use of a baby chicken known to man. The turmeric gloop of curry sauce: a nightmarish katsu for the 1970s. And mushy peas? Actually, I quite like chip-shop mushy peas. But it’s worth noting that they aren’t naturally that dazzling shade of shamrock green – that’s down to neon food colouring <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/8288887/The-Kitchen-Thinker-Food-colourings.html> so lurid you add only a couple of drops a litre. And you avoid spilling unless you want to spend the next month as the Incredible Hulk.
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> It’s so, so bad for you. Yes, yes: most takeaway meals are. But fish and chips is different. For one thing, there’s the portion sizes, which range from absolutely huge to mind-blowingly massive <http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/thats-a-ridiculous-amount-of-chips-says-britain-2013011155662>, that are plonked on the counter like a challenge you have to face down. The result? You finish them – and your stomach looks like something Phileas Fogg would use to attempt an 80-day world trip. You groan as though you’ve taken a cricket bat to the stomach because you feel as though you’ve taken a cricket bat to the stomach.
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> At least fried-chicken shops use spices to give their batter some zing. At least burger joints accompany their chips with something that hasn’t also dwindled in the deep-fat fryer. Why is it that, at all other greasy takeaways, you can eat a meal the flavour of which transcends its oil content?
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> Here’s why: because fish and chips is traditional British food. Food from an era when offering British cooking to foreign friends would cause them to remember prior engagements and leap from 10-storey windows. Food that’s uninventive, old-fashioned and fundamentally flawed. Food from the bad old days of British cuisine. Really, that’s exactly where it should have stayed.
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