In 1860 Joseph Malin opened a fish and chip shop in Cleveland Way, in London’s East End. It was a poor, densely populated, immigrant area, not unlike New York’s Lower East Side, with a large Jewish population. Joseph Malin was a Jewish immigrant, his surname suggests that his family came from Eastern Europe. He was one of the earliest Eastern European immigrants, arriving probably 30 or 40 years before the massive waves of Jewish immigration that began in the 1880s.
He kept his shop in Cleveland Way for a few years then moved his premises to the nearby Old Ford Road. The business remained there until the 1970s. Like most small Jewish businesses at the time it was a family affair, in the 1891 national census Joseph Malin is listed as a fishmonger, his wife as a fishmonger’s assistant, one of his daughters was described as a potato peeler and the other as a fish fryer. 40 years earlier, in the 1851 census, the family had been described as ‘rug weavers’. There is no way of knowing whether the family’s change of career from weaving to fish frying was due to necessity, or whether Joseph Malin opened a chippie because he thought, rightly, that he had spotted an opportunity.
Malin’s Old Ford Road chippie features in a Movietone Newsreel made in 1960. The proprietor then was Joseph’s great grandson, Daniel Malin. Ten years later the business was bought by the American fast food franchise Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips; Daniel moved to the USA to work with them and the Old Ford Road shop closed. A plaque (pictured above) now marks the site.
Unfortunately Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips did not have the same longevity as Joseph Malin’s chippie. At its peak, in the late 1970s, Treacher’s had an estimated 800 outlets. There are now none left.
Joseph Malin is generally considered to be the first person in the world to open a fish and chip shop. Not everyone agrees. In 1863, in Mossley, near Oldham in the North of England, a man named John Lees was on record as selling fish and chips from a wooden hut in the market. It is possible that Lees had started frying his fish two or three years before anyone took note of his market stall, and that he started his business before Joseph Malin. The consensus, though, is that Malin beat him to it.
Just because the world’s first chippie was opened by a Jewish family does not, of course, make fish and chips a Jewish dish. Indeed, there is nothing very Jewish about potato chips – or fries as they are called in America. It is thought that Belgium is where the first finger-sized sticks of potato were fried, though some claim that it was in France and others say Scotland. Nobody claims that Jews invented chips. But fried fish is almost certainly a Jewish invention. And so too is the idea of putting both fish and chips together on the same plate (or plastic container, or even wrapping them in newspaper as they did in Britain when I was growing up.)
Fried fish was brought to Britain by Jews from Amsterdam, when they first settled in London in the late 17th century. They were of Portuguese-Jewish ancestry, and they arrived bearing the recipe for their traditional shabbat dish, piscado frito. Usually made from cod or haddock, the fish was coated in flour then fried in oil. This sealed the flavour in and allowed the fish to be kept overnight and eaten cold, making it suitable for meals on shabbat, when cooking is prohibited. Cold fried fish is still a shabbat staple in many Jewish households. It tastes somewhat different from hot fried fish.
The knowledge that fried fish was a Jewish dish was circulating long before Joseph Malin opened his restaurant. When Thomas Jefferson’s returned to the USA after one of his visits to England in the 1780s he wrote that he had eaten fish fried “in the Jewish fashion.” And in 1781, a British cookbook referred to “the Jews’ way of preserving all sorts of fish”, advising that if the fried fish was placed in a into a jar filled with oil, vinegar and spices it could be kept for a good year.
By the mid-19th century fried fish was a standard dish in most Jewish homes. In 1848, when she published her Jewish Manual, a guide on how to run a Jewish home, Lady Judith Montefiore included a recipe for fried fish. She also had a recipe for fried potato shavings (perhaps the thin crunchy things that come these days in packets, which, confusingly, the English call crisps and the Americans, chips). And in 1859, Alexis Soyer the chef at the swanky Reform Club wrote “there is another excellent way of frying fish which is constantly in use by the children of Israel, and I cannot recommend it too highly.” In his cookbook he recommended using halibut, dipped in a batter of flour and water and deep fried.
When the lightweight, bare-knuckle boxer Barney Aaron, “the Star of the East”, fought Peter Warren on April 6th, 1824, the fight was staged 18 miles outside London, so as not to attract the attention of the Bow Street Runners, London’s police force. The fight attracted a lot of attention but 18 miles was a long way for a working class population who had no horses or carriages; Barney Aaron’s many supporters had no choice but to walk to the venue. The night before the fight, the streets of the East End thronged with people frying fish, to sustain those about to set off on the long journey to the fight.
Strictly speaking it wasn’t necessary to fry one’s own fish. Those who couldn’t or wouldn’t cook for themselves could always buy fried fish from the Jewish hawkers who went about the streets of the East End selling it from trays strapped around their necks. The hawkers sold their fried fish cold, Joseph Malin however is unlikely to have done so. His chips were hot, and presumably so too was his fish.
It was selling his food hot that made Joseph Malin’s invention popular; hot fish and chips was a nourishing and relatively cheap meal, ideal for impoverished, working class people. It is not likely that fish and chip shops would have been very successful in damp, grey Britain if they had served their cod, haddock or plaice cold. Even so, in his book Children of the Ghetto, the early 20th century author Israel Zangwill gushed that “with the audacity of true culinary genius, Jewish fried fish is always served cold. The skin is a beautiful brown, the substance firm and succulent.” He declared that it was their common passion for fried fish which bound the Anglo-Jewish community together.
Unsurprisingly, fried fish became weaponised by the antisemites. When the long-forgotten journalist George Augusts Sala visited the theatre in 1872, he complained about Jews sitting in the boxes, and a strong smell of fried fish in the reception rooms. Someone else complained that when the Chief Rabbi visited Margate, the seaside town smelled of fish. It is odd that, for all their supposed superiority, antisemites have never been very imaginative or intelligent about their insults.
Fish and chip shops started out as takeaways but in 1896 Samuel Isaacs went upmarket. His restaurant still catered to the working class, but Samuel Isaacs treated his customers to an evening out. They sat in a carpeted restaurant, with a tablecloth and flowers, while waiters served them a meal of fish and chips, with bread and butter and a cup of tea. Today, fish and chips can be ordered in the poshest of places.
It was modern fishing techniques and improved transport links that helped fish and chip shops to become the great, cheap and satisfying staple of takeaway English cuisine. The dish’s popularity rivalled that of the other great, cheap early British staple of jellied eel, mash, and meat pie (Jews are never credited with inventing that). By the late 1920s there were 35,000 fish and chip shops in the country. Of the 776 fish and chip shops listed in London in 1923, 148 were owned by people with Jewish names.
History suggests that fish and chips, rather than beigels or gefilte fish is the most popular of all Jewish dishes. If a Jewish dish means one invented by Jews, rather than eaten by them, then it probably is the most popular. For my money, I’d rather have a latke.