Wednesday 3 March 2010

Tea Time at the Mount continued


This was it! A taste of nostalgia....Fish and chips served in newspaper at The Mount and the more you ate the more you learned.


Fish and chips became popular in the second half of the 19th century due to the development of trawl fishing in the North Sea. Trawlers landed a mixed catch of high quality and cheaper fish. As railway charges fell, cheaper fish could be transported inland by rail and it became mass-marketed and less of a luxury.

"Chips may have first appeared around the same time, the earliest usage of the word "chips" was mentioned by Dickens in "A Tale of Two Cities"(1859):
"Husky chips of potatoes, fried with some reluctant drops of oil".

The modern "chippy" originated in the UK and, despite the smell associated by frying which led to complaints by many authorities, they continued to trade because during World War II, fish and chips remained one of the few foods not subject to rationing.

2 comments:

Anne S said...

There's a sort of redolent remembered flavour of fish n chips served in newspaper, which I clearly recall from my childhood, when we used to sneak off from boarding school into town and purchase 5 pence worth of chips and devour them on the way back to school.

aliholli said...

Anne, you little devil, you! Anyway fish and chips just aren't the same out of polystyrene trays with plastic forks... that's why I was so made up when the pub served it like this... it almost brought me out in goosebumps.