Basic HTML Version
4
City & Village Tours: 0845 812 5000 info@cityandvillagetours.com
a fair bit of scapegoating. In Burgundy they caused plagues
of leprosy: here they sparked outbreaks of what always
sounds to me like the Devil’s own firm of solicitors -
Pox, Scrofula and Ague. If you’d like to know more about
the potato I’d recommend
The History & Social Influence
of the Potato (1947)
by N. Saloman. It’s awfully good for
insomnia too. And if that doesn’t work try
Potato Crisps,
Modern Frying Methods
by HT Reeves published in 1933.
Britain is Ready for the Fish & Chip Supper
By the 1780s some 500 cartloads of fish were arriving each
year at Billingsgate from Brixham alone. The roads of
course were still rubbish but Grimsby fishermen pioneered
the transport of live fish and by the 1850s the use of ice was
spreading, farmed in specially flooded fields and stored in
ice-houses. The distribution of fish finally reached an
industrial scale with the rapid development of North Sea
trawl fishing and the coming of the railways. In 1852
Billingsgate was totally rebuilt to cope with the new
volumes arriving on the fish trains. Everything was in
place for the advent of the fish & chip supper.
The
Encyclopedia of Jewish Food
(1997) credits the
Spanish and Portuguese Sephardic Jews for introducing
fried fish to this country when they arrived as refugees in
the sixteenth century. Frying helped preserve the fish,
which could then be eaten cold on the Sabbath when
cooking was forbidden. There’s plenty of evidence to
support a Jewish origin not least that President Thomas
Jefferson wrote about eating “fried fish in the Jewish
fashion” on a visit to the capital towards the end of the
eighteenth century. By 1846 the first Jewish cookbook
published in England included a recipe for it.
Eight years later the first printed recipe for fried cooked
potatoes appeared in “
A Shilling Cookery For The People
”
The old mediaeval fishponds known as stewes were
spruced up and regulated and harsh penalties enforced
for illicit meat consumption or trading. A Hammersmith
wife caught trafficking pork was paraded in the market
place draped in garlands of “
the piggyes pettie toes”.
Shakespeare’s Chips
“How the Devil Luxury with his fat rump and potato
fingers tickles these together. Fry, lechery, fry!
Shakespeare Troilus & Cressida Act V, Scene II
Sadly despite using both the words potato and fry this is
not the earliest chip reference in literature. The deformed
and scurrilous Greek Theristes is spying on a bit of hanky
panky and uses the phrase potato-finger for lovers as we
we might say someone has green fingers or a sweet tooth.
It’s doubtful it’s even the right sort of potato but more
likely the sweet potato brought from Haiti by Columbus
when he sailed the ocean blue in 1492. Served crystalised
like glace cherries you didn’t eat these Shakespearean
spuds because they were tasty. You ate them, probably
with your nose crinkled up just a little bit, to show off
your wealth. As every schoolboy once knew it was
Sir Francis Drake who stumbled upon the
solanum
potato
of chip fame on the coast of Chile in 1578. Legend has
Drake bring them home but there is no hard evidence that
he did but however they got here it wasn’t long before
they too were being hailed as aphrodisiacs. Potatoes, said
the Elizabethans, excited Venus. In truth it is more likely
that the sudden introduction of this vitamin C rich
vegetable was such a shot in the arm that it made the
malnourished populace just a little more perky all round.
The Elizabethans ate a pretty parlous diet being quite
convinced that fresh fruit and vegetables caused fevers
and bloody fluxes and should therefore not be allowed to
interfere with a judicious intake of beer, bread and beef.
Potatoes though were “new and foreign” which allowed
them to bypass the stigma of other vegetables but they
were also “not mentioned in the bible” and so came in for