Hyper-regional chippy traditions of Britain and Ireland | Hacker News Reader

Hyper-regional chippy traditions of Britain and Ireland

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The tradition down here in Brighton is for a herring gull to steal the fish before you’ve had a chance to taste it.

So. Bankers, Bardsley’s or Regency?

Bankers usually, but occasionally Bardsley's if I'm around there.

I think Italy might declare war on us if they ever find out what terrible (though possibly delicious) things are done to pizzas in Scotland.

Pizza fritta is at least a Neopolitan tradition. I thank them for starting this wonderful trend.

I don't think the Neopolitan version coats the pizza in batter before deep frying it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep-fried_pizza

I had a "pizza burger" in the south of England once, which was something like a cheese burger inside a pizza with doner kebab on top.

Mazo coated fish here in NW London, fat golden chips in a paper rose doused in vinegar with a heavy dose of salt, but nothing compared to hot and fat chips doused in curry sauce from the Lobster Pot in Liverpool accompanied by a can of brew and some weed

Don't please. I am salivating. One of the things that people in the UK and Ireland do not realize is how lucky they are to have varieties of potatoes. I have never seen anything other than the classifications of Red/Russet/Yellow/White in North America. Perhaps there are some regional growers of Kerr's Pink or Maris Piper but they certainly do not stock the supermarkets with them and I have never seen them in farmer's markets.

It's hard to find truly deep variety in potatoes in the US. I don't think people buy enough of the "non-standard" forms to really justify selling them to consumers (restaurants are a different story). There are a few exceptions, for example Monterey Market in Berkeley, CA has a wide range of potato variants (fingerling, banana, purple) depending on what's available.

Need to start calling them ‘heirloom’ varieties like tomatoes.

Weird, that really surprises me. Even the petrol (gas) station across the road (highway) from my flat (apartment) sells generic white, generic red, new, Charlotte, sweet (yams?), and Maris Piper. Maybe one of jersey royal & king Edward too, I'm not sure.

Potatoes are shockingly cheap too, for some reason I suddenly 'noticed' that at the weekend, around 40p/kg, (uh.. 25c/lb ish) that's crackers (cookies for cheese) isn't it?

I'm sure there's other things you have or have variety in that we don't, but I wouldn't fancy not having a choice of potatoes. Though I almost always get Maris Piper to be honest, so it's not even really about choice as such, just knowing what I like and what I'm getting, I only buy 'white' if there's nothing specific (and more appropriate) available.

Sometimes 'white' will tell you what the actually are (this batch) on the date/producer label bit, or what they might be a mix of, which is nice.

Well, that's more than I've previously written or thought about potatoes...

At my farmers market this past weekend 1 farmers had 9 different varietals of potato including some I would have guessed were radishes. The stall next had another 7 with only 1 overlap.

Is it possible you are in an environment where potatoes aren’t very profitable crops? Because I see lots of variety in potatoes routinely and “North America” is a very big place to be saying anything about the food ways.

I have to be honest, I don't know of anywhere in Britain or Ireland that has risen to the challenge of bake and shark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs_3wuEjXq0 (although, full disclosure, I haven't had the chance to eat one myself yet). This should really be a source of national self-examination in Scotland.

As an American, I'd never heard of American Chip Spice, so I had to look it up (http://americanchipspice.co.uk/about/).

> "Where did this ground breaking product come from?" I hear you cry. Well (obviously!) American Chip Spice started in Yorkshire.

I don't have anything to add. I'm still laughing.

Wait 'till you find out what an Americano pizza in Finland is: https://www.sspfinland.fi/files/6115/7709/5902/1Pizzamenu_Ce...

Spoiler: pork, tinned pineapple and blue cheese, of course.

"American" pizza in Montreal is just Pepperoni pizza. Which I always find funny.

I’ve always thought you could make a tidy profit by opening an authentic chippy in the Bay Area. There is nothing like that here and it’s delicious. There’s a food truck in SF that’s owned by Brits but the fish is done in the American style (3-4 smaller pieces vs. one huge slab of cod cooked in a room-sized fryer, as you’d get from a real chippy)

The Edinburgh Castle on Geary is pretty good, memory is fuzzy on how authentic it is. I think you order and they run down an alley to pickup from a neighbouring place.. A fun place to spend Hogmanay (if things are open by then)!

Tugboat in south San Jose batters and fries their fish to order.

It'd be interesting to see what you can get where laid out on a map

Growing up in the north west I'd never even heard of battered sausages until I was in home counties. Conversely, I don't recall the southern chippies having steak puddings; and gravy on chips also seems regional

Where in the north west? They seem a standard to me on the Wirral and in Manchester.

Strange, this was just south of Manc proper

Perhaps when one shop in town adds it to the menu the rest have to follow suit?

The best amalgamation happened down south - a kebab shop diversified into a pizzas, and thus you could get kebab pizza...

Quite possibly, it's interesting how local these things can be. I'd not really even considered that places wouldn't sell battered sausages. It would be almost like going in and finding out that they didn't offer fish battered - it just seemed so standard. I guess while I've lived in a variety of cities I've only been to a fairly small number of chip shops, something I'd not considered until now.

Perhaps because they were listed as pies? ;) I grew up in Dorset with steak pies available, but it'd be an unusual order for sure, they definitely wouldn't sell many, you'd probably waiting a few minutes for them to.. microwave it I suppose.

I can't really think of anything we had that's region specific, mostly just fish and chips, with fish cakes, sausages, pea fritters, and occasionally pies also available.

Definitely no gravy, except at Chinese takeaways, (along with 'curry sauce' and sweet & sour) on greasy fries of course, not chippy chips.

Steak pudding isn't the same thing as steak pie, though.

In my hometown in Ireland, potato scallops were maybe the fourth most popular order after regular chips, curry chips and battered sausages. After leaving for Dublin, I found they weren't that widespread elsewhere in the country. Then I found them in a town near Leeds when visiting a friend. I don't think they were as popular there, as I had to explain the concept (basically battered potato slices) to my friend who'd lived there a good period of time, but was still glad to find them a little more widespread than my first post-moving out destination implied

I wonder if literal bartered scallops could be really nice as an alternative to fish?

Too expensive and subtle for battering and deep frying IMO.

Scampi fits your bill though?

It's fairly common for fish and chip shops in New Zealand to offer battered scallops, oysters and mussels.

People trying to claim regional ownership of such an obviously winning combination as chips, cheese, beans and/or gravy is absurd. Even the Canadians got in on that one.

I am made unspeakably happy by this article. I love you, UK regional nightmare foods

this article includes places in Ireland that are not in the UK!

There are many dishes to be discovered in the Central Belt, but my favourite is the hoagie wrap - chips, cheese, Doner, and sauce all wrapped in flatbread for ease of consumption.

What's the etymology on that? I only know of hoagie as a Philly thing

I do miss the motherland sometimes. I'm all about gravy but wrapping a pie in a cob/barm/buttie/etc does seem a bit odd. Maybe not after a few brews though!

Yeah, but I also kind of get it. I think a but of bread to soak up the pie gravy could be quite nice! I would probably butter the buns though for the initial bite!

As an American I must say... bravo. Truly these are some next level fried foods. Deep fried oreos and deep fried butter don't hold a greasy candle to this stuff.

What do they means by "scraps"?

mentioned that it would identify where someone was from, but don't say what it is. As well as certain dishes with scraps please.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I know scraps as the small bits of batter which are left in the deep fryer after cooking battered fish. After a while there is a fair amount in there and you can ask to have them fished out (pun intended) and served with whatever you were ordering.

Interesting read, however: London has almost no specific fish and chip traditions of its own. That will be because it's mostly chicken down here :)

https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/07/13/britains-extra-crispy-c...

And here I was thinking this was about carpentry.

Still wish you could get poutine over here...

I patiently await the followup article about poutine variations.

Chippy chips haven't been the same since they had a hint of the taste of the newspaper outer wrapper's ink.

Smoked haddock and chips is delicious. Comes in just ahead of the spicebag/box, closely followed by scampi.

Here a "chippy" is a carpenter, we seldom eat them

As a lover of complex carbohydrates, my hat is off to the practice of putting chips on a bun.

There was a recent bbc post on the divide across Scotland. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-scotland-51193539

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