My auntie ran the fish and chip shop in Sproatley for many years - used to go and stay with her for the weekend and basically have fish and chips (or just chips) for Friday night, breakfast dinner and tea on Saturday.... no wonder the old cholesterol is high but it was worth it! Always hoped I'd see Chris Chilton in the shop but never did. And it was always skin on......
Another few notes: The best chippies should be closed when you attempt to use them and only ever open about 2 or 3 times a week and then only open at awkward largely unusable times. Also, I haven’t seen someone* buy and eat a pattie 'in shop' whilst waiting for their fish to be cooked for a quite a while. * usually some sort of builder type. The evil of some chippies using rehydrated potato for their patties. Again, traditionally, their flesh was gleaned from baked jacket spuds.
Abso f**ing lutely. Hull Fair week, Dundee has the chance to earn a fortune. Resolutely kept his doors closed. If it helps i ate a patty butty in that one next to the garage on Chants, while my lad waited for his order. This was after the Southampton game. Their chips arent very good but the patties are lovely plenny of sage.
I used to like the minty ones the Goldenfry used to do when it first opened. Shame they reverted to the norm, although I do love sagey ones too. The kids at work swear blind that the best patties in Hull are from Sam's. Not sure where it is but apparently its a chinese takeaway in East Hull that does patties.
Traditional or not, beef dripping tastes better and is in fact healthier with being an entirely natural product. These artificially extracted vegetable oils produce all sorts of nasty chemicals when heated up from aldehydes to trans-fats but they seem to be commonly used in modern day chippies under the guise of "looking after our customers' health". Nut oil though is a new one on me, at least in the case of deep-frying fish and chips in it. Must be expensive to produce in mass-quantities.
Personally, I don’t believe that beef dripping do taste better. Of course, this is subjective, but I must admit that I find the idea of cooking anything in animal slime repugnant. This is a (relatively) interesting piece on the matter of oils used in chip shops: http://www.federationoffishfriers.co.uk/pages/nutritional-info-605.htm This concludes that rapeseed oil is the healthiest – although, how many ‘shops’ use it as opposed to other veg oils? I’m not sure on the cost of nut oil but you could well be right and it could explain why chip shops in Hull moved away from using it.
Are you a builder type? Anyway, if you weren't waiting for a main order whilst eating your pattie butty - no it doesn't count. It has to be your main order you're waiting for whilst consuming a pattie, battered sausage or possibly even a pickled egg. Anyone on here pay for a fork upgrade?
I doubt many use Rapeseed oil even though it is generally considered to be the healthiest to cook anything in. Most will probably just use cheapo vegetable oil and boast the usual 'healthy' claptrap about high in polyunsaturates and low in saturates. Which is generally a load of bollocks. I cannot believe no-one has brought up the debate surrounding them being served in a polystyrene tray vs newspaper though. It's gotta be newspaper surely - the print ink adds a certain quality that just cannot be obtained from anything else. I also hate the squeaky sound of polystyrene.
Using newspaper for wrapping is sustainability and should be brought back – plus it allows the infamous cliché ‘today’s headlines…’ The tray standardises portion sizes, diminishing the individuality of the shop and whilst some generous assistants may pile on top (particularly on a wrapped order) it promotes a universal fit and in most cases dreaded stinginess. Are chip shops the only places in the country where people have the opportunity to call tomato ketchup 'red sauce'?
I'm sure I've seen it relatively recently as a supplementary wrapping, rather than the main wrap. Perhaps though, this particular chippy was themselves raising the black flag as part of the fight back?
You are definitely correct on that. Going further, I've even seen the odd shop where the standard portion was one scoop of chips, and the scoop was shaken to make sure the portion was level and didn't exceed regulation height. Never happened when everything was piled into a heap of newspaper.
Yes I've seen that very recently. But they had to use a couple of inner layers of clean sanitised paper, with a token gesture of newspaper on the outside.
It’d be a sad state of affairs when people can order a ‘regular’ portion of chips or even, chips by the gramme. One scoop? That must have been difficult to take if you were watching on?
You're not allowed to use newspaper at all nowadays, though some places use that fake newspaper print wrapping paper. Almost all chippies use beef dripping, a vegetarian friend of mine went checking lots of them and it was only really the Chinese places used vegetable oil to fry in.
There was a TV programme about someone doing an old house up in Coltman Street - was the home of one Christopher Pickering (Pickering Park) in the the 1800s. They did some research on Christopher Pickering and he was quite a benefactor to Hull in lots of ways, but in relation to this topic - he owned a fleet of trawlers and was the first to use steam trawlers, so his fleet could go out further to catch haddock and keep the catch fresh to bring back to Hull. This meant that Hull had the best fish & chips and probably why it has to be haddock in Hull. I don't know what oil they used though - never mentioned that bit . . .
