[Sca-cooks] Batter frying--the origin of fish and chips?

[David Friedman]

I recently got into an exchange on a newsgroup, growing in part out 
of a webbed piece about the origin of fish and chips. That got me 
curious about how early the technique used for the fish--dip in 
batter and deep fry--appears. Can anyone think of examples, for fish 
or even for other things, in the period corpus? The closest that 
occurred to me was fritters--but it isn't clear to me if they were 
deep fried, and I don't think any of them were fish.

The webbed piece was:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3380151.stm
-- 
David/Cariadoc
www.daviddfriedman.com