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

[Johnna Holloway]

There's a paper  in the Oxford Symposium on Fish
on Fish and Chips and their development. Nothing therein
mentions Jewish tradtions for the fish frying.
Wilson mentions the fried fish in her fish chapter in Food and Drink in 
Britain
and cites PNB or A Proper Newe Book of Cookery.
The online edition of that which is the Frere version which would be 1557-58
http://staff-www.uni-marburg.de/~gloning/bookecok.htm
Soles or any other fyshes fryed.
appears in the second course of a fish day menu.

The recipe for A Pyke sauce for a Pyke, Breme, Perche, Roche, Carpe, 
Eles, Floykes and almaner of brouke fyshe.
 
ends with
And also yf you wyll
frye them, you muste take a good quantitie of
persely, after the fyshe is fryed, put in the
persely into the fryinge panne, and let it frye
in the butter and take it up and put it on the
fryed fyshe, and frye place, whyttinge and
suche other fyshe, excepte Eles, freshe Salmon,
Conger, which be never fryed but baken, boyled,
roosted or sodden.

But this seems to indicate pan frying in butter, not deep frying.

Johnnae

David Friedman wrote:

> 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