MawB2 Fri 30-Oct-20 19:03:02
I love a good fish and chips so when our local village pub started offering takeaway fish and chips on a Friday nightI thought “Wonderful.”
Let me take you back to the early 1950's. I was just a small boy but how I loved fish & chips. My grandmother had a fish & chip shop in Ramsgate and during the school holidays I would stay with my granny.
The day started at 6:00am, the potatoes went into the peeling machine, it wasn't electric, it had a hand crank that rotated the abrasive drum. You had to keep checking on the potatoes, any lost flesh meant lost profits.
When the potatoes were all peeled they had to have the blemishes removed. My granny referred to those blemishes as eyes and the procedure was called eyeing the potatoes.
Once done they went into a large, bath-like holder with a solution of white vinegar and water, about one part vinegar to twenty parts water, this prevented discolouration.
By now it would be mid morning and the ice delivery would arrive. There was nothing electric in my grandmother's shop, other than the lighting.
Once the ice had been stored in the walk-in freezer the fish would be cleaned gutted and filleted. You could hold a fish skeleton up and not see a scrap of flesh on it, so skilled at filleting was my granny.
As lunchtime opening approached I would be put to work on chipping the potatoes, this meant tipping them into the hopper one bucket load at a time. This machine was also operated by a hand crank, you had to rotate a handle and watch the chips as they fell into an enamel bucket.
When frying commenced that somewhat pungent smell of beef dripping became the most agreeable aroma as the fat got hot. There were four pans, two large ones for the chips the other two for the fish. It was wonderful.
There's a postscript that you might like. A couple of times a week, a small girl would come in and ask if there was any scratchings. That was the name given to the bits of batter that fell from the fish as it cooked. My granny knew this girl quite well. The child would be given lots of smaller chips, a few scratchings and lots of small pieces of fish, deliberately broken up to look like they were to be discarded. It was quite a meal. My grandmother later told me that the little girl was one of eight children and the family was not well off. I learned that the butcher, greengrocer and other retailers all did something similar. The welfare state was still in it's infancy, this is how the community looked after the poorest of all. It's a lesson that I have always remembered.
I hope that you get the fish and chips that you so anticipated, had you been around in my grannies day the outer wrapping would have been newspaper, it kept a meal insulated in the days before microwaves.
