Monday, 20 March 2017
I am a great admirer of British
ingenuity and inventiveness in all sorts of things, and having practiced as a
lawyer, particularly in the field of law.
But when it comes to culinary
matters, it is a different story altogether. In my estimation, they are the
ones who invariably bring up the rear of the line among the western European
cuisines.
Yet, yet, even there, they came
up exactly what poor folks and students like me needed to make ends meet: fish
and chips.
As we Canadians would phrase it, what can be
more British than fish and chips, eh?
Well, according to one historical
culinary whiz, the battered fish was brought from Portuguese Jews, all forcibly
converted between 1497 and the 1700s, who continued to practice their Judaism
secretly until they fled to England during the 1700s.
The British through BBC finally
confessed their own answer to this question in the first episode of a program
titled “The Best of British Takeaways”.
Considering the answer came on
the very first program, they must have been anxious to fess- up: The Jews!
So according to historian Denise Phillips,
the recipe for fried fish came to U.K with Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe
in the 1800s
These Jews opened what were then called fried fish warehouses adapting an
original recipe for fish that was coated in breadcrumbs, cooked on Fridays to
be eaten cold on Sabbath.
Some say, it was served to the British
public for the first time by a Jewish fellow in 1860.It became a great commercial
success. By 1910, there were some 25,000 fish and chips shops called
“chippies”.
The in due course, batter
replaced breadcrumbs.
But, British pride being what it
is, not everyone on the British Isles is prepared to concede the concoction of
this British culinary masterpiece to the Jews. Hence, others, credit a man
called John Lees who had a fish hut, of
all places, in Lancashire in 1863.
Now you know!
Source: Sue Surkes, BBC: ‘Typically British’ fish &chips
introduced by Jews www.timesofisrael.com , March 14, 2017
About the forcibly converted Jews
on the Iberian Peninsula, cf.: Dogan D. Akman, A Scholarly Blind Spot:The Term 'marrano', Sephardic Horizons, Volume 3,.Issue 1, 2013, sephar@sephardichorizons.org
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