Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Fish n' Chips

Episode Date: October 2, 2019

How did these two wonderful strangers meet up and become best friends? The answers lie within today's short stuff.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck.

There's blimey old, bloody old Jerry. And this is short stuff, everyone. I get you every time, buddy. I don't think there's a single short stuff intro that I haven't made you snicker. They're also silly. I love it. I'm glad you like it.

So we talking about chippies? Yeah, man. So apparently chips, what we call in America, French fries, what they call in France, just fries, are called chips because it's short for chipped potatoes, which is just cutting up a potato and frying it. Apparently that's chipping it, which I don't know. Does that explain cream chipped beef?

Like do you cut up beef and fry it and then add it to like a creamy sauce? Is that where that comes from? I don't think it's fried, I think, or is it? I'm asking, buddy. Well, you have the light bulb above your head. I thought that meant you had an idea, not a question. No, no, no.

No, that's a question mark. I have a light bulb in the shape of a question mark. I'm glad you finally noticed. I think chipped beef is just the quality of the beef is sort of chipped off. I don't think it's fried. It might be wrong. I don't know if that's it.

I like that. OK, well, we're not talking about cream chipped beef, are we? No. We're talking about fish and chips. We're talking about chippies. Fish and chips. A chippy is a fish and chip shop. They're synonymous with the United Kingdom, of course.

And I ate fish and chips every time I've been over to the United Kingdom. I'm sure you probably had a little bit. I never have. Really? I know. I feel like a total jerk. But researching this made me definitely guarantee

that I will next time. Well, I mean, there are plenty of great things to eat in the United Kingdom that are known in the United Kingdom. Like tikka masala? Sure, right. Did you have any of that? Yes, plenty of that.

But fish and chips, they hit their boom in the late 1920s. There were about 35,000 chippies in the UK. Now there are about 10,000 in change. And they serve 360 million meals a year in the UK of fish and chips. That's equal to 360 million Big Mac meals. That's right. And you might be thinking to yourself,

this has probably been going on since the dawn of time over there. They've been frying up fish. But no, no. It was only a couple of hundred years ago, you would have to go back and ask for fish and chips where they would just look at you cross-eyed and say, oh, I'll start right back.

Right. And kick you out of their shop. Yeah, because it was a tannery. It was a tannery. But it all goes back very interestingly to Sephardic Jews. All the way back, apparently, to at least the eighth century in Spain, where Sephardic Jews lived and thrived and worked and played and observed the Sabbath, or Shabbat, or Sabbath.

It's in there, which meant that they were not allowed to cook from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. They were allowed to eat. They just weren't allowed to cook. And I believe that's still the case. So the Sephardic Jews of Spain said, you know what? I'll bet if we took some fresh fish and we battered it lightly and fried it,

it would taste really good still by Saturday afternoon. They were right. They were right. And so frying fish took off. And it became basically synonymous with Sephardic Jews. And they started to travel far and wide. They were pushed out of Spain. And then later Portugal, once Spain and Portugal got married.

And so they started to travel the world. And wherever they went with them, they took this fried fish recipe with them everywhere. That's right. And they would sell it on the streets in England with sort of like the cigarette lady would come around back in the day. Cigars, cigarettes.

Exactly. Cigars. Selling it on like a tray with a strap around their neck, which by the way, Portland, Maine on the sidewalk, you can get oyster shucked from a cart. I did not see that. Like just walk up and say, just give me a couple of oysters. It's like shuck a buck type of thing.

Do it right now. Here's some money. I would just follow that guy around. I can say I had the best saltwater taffy I've ever had in my life that I purchased on the coast of Maine. Oh, really? Oh, just not even close. And I had eight lobster rolls between Boston and Portland,

Maine over four days. That's nice, man. Because I wanted to kind of find my favorite. And I did. That's good. Where was it? It was at the Sea Salt Gourmet Shop in Cape Elizabeth. OK.

It was delicious. Did you get a t-shirt? And the worst one I had was in the airport. Oh, I can bet. That's like playing slots in the Vegas airport. It's just not the same, you know? It's flying out, and I was like, one more. It's just like slots in the Vegas airport.

So Jewish immigrants are selling these in England. Even Thomas Jefferson visited England and wrote about fried fish in the Jewish fashion. And it took trains and railroads to really spread it out of London and far and wide throughout the UK. Because all of a sudden, you could get fresh fish to faraway places really fast. And it was a pretty big hit.

It was a big hit. But again, now we're still just talking about fried fish. The chips haven't made an intro yet. So we're going to leave you hanging for now, as it were, wondering, will the chips ever come? We'll find out right after this message break. MUSIC On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called David Lasher

and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger

and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice

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So I'm dying to know, have the chips come? The chips are coming, finally. OK, good. So it's funny to think of, because you think of potatoes as like super Irish, you think of chips as super English, but they were actually South American. I mean, like the potatoes that we know and love today weren't really brought to Europe until the,

I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, they weren't really brought to Europe until the, maybe the end of the 15th century from the earliest explorers of South America. Yeah, and people weren't eating them up,

like they were hard and weird and everyone's like, I can't even eat this stuff, it's not even edible. So it took, you know, Belgium's popular for their fries. Yes, because they do it right. They do do it right, and that's where the whole fried potato thing started, well actually in Spain in the 16th century. But then they brought them north to what was called then Spanish Netherlands, which is now close to modern day Belgium.

Right. And here's the deal, they would cut these things up into fish shapes and fry them, these fishermen would, which is like the cutest thing ever to do in the 17th century. It is, but I don't think that has any connection whatsoever to fish and chips, does it? I don't think so, I mean, I think this historian said basically they eventually got to Great Britain

in the 1860s, and it just kind of coincided with the Sephardic Jews selling these fried fish meals. Right. And it all just sort of went hand in hand. Right, so again, they think that Sephardic Jewish fried fish peddlers said, hey man, I really like this idea of frying potatoes too, I'll bet this would go really well with my fried fish.

And there's a couple of claims of the first fish and chip shop or chippies, one in London and one outside of Manchester in Mosville. In where? Mosville. How's that spelled? M-O-Z, Ville. Okay.

After Morrissey. Yeah, I love it. But I think it's actually called Mosley. Mosley? Yeah. Yeah. But Mosville is what I call Mosley now. I got you.

Okay. So the one near Manchester was definitely like kicking butt by 1863. Okay. The one in Lunderhood? Mosville and Lunderhood, the new names. Wow, I love that. In the neighborhood in London, B-O-W, I don't know if

it's bow or bow, but this was in 1860 and they claimed to be the very first one to sell that combo. Mm-hmm. And good old Lunderville. Yep, Lunderville and Mosville. So, no, Lunderhood. Lunderhood. It already evolved again.

So, this is the 1860s when definitely the latest that the first Chippies were established. And by the Fendi Siegel, which as far as I know applies only to the turn of the 20th century, right? I guess. Okay. By the turn of the 20th century, the beginning of the 20th century, they are just everywhere.

Oh, yeah. I think you said 35,000 in its peak in the 1920s. Even by 1910, there was something like 25,000 of them in the UK. And just to keep morale going during World War I, Prime Minister at the time, David Lloyd George, ordered that fish and chips and everything associated with making fish and chips be kept off the ration list.

Yeah, they wanted to keep people happy. Yeah. And I think it worked. And so much so that in World War II, Churchill did the same thing, right? That's right. You know, keep this fish and chip thing going because they are good companions.

There's a little bit of Schwarzenegger in there. There was. So in that war at Normandy on D-Day, apparently an identifier, a secret code for the Brits is they would yell out fish and they would wait for a coded response. I love how this House of Works article says, barely coded, chips. Right.

And because Germans would figure it out and say, chips and soot. That was Schwarzenegger for sure. Sure. It was a little weak for Schwarzenegger. It was robust. Here's the deal. I like mine with Charter Sauce.

I didn't say anything about Charter Sauce in here. Oh, yeah. I think that may be, I don't know, I might be wrong, but that feels like even though it's a French thing in origin, an American bastardization, but that's just me guessing because nowhere in here did I see anyone in the UK eating Charter Sauce. I might be wrong.

I think it might have been in the image on this House of Works article. Well, that means nothing. But there's also in the article, there's a blob of green, which is apparently what you will find it served with in the north of England. Yep. Mashed peas, which according to Dave Ruse, who wrote

this House of Works article, are way better tasting than they look. Yeah. I had that in Dublin. I went to a chippy and got some peas. Also, obviously, malt vinegar on everything. Yeah. I've come to like that too.

I remember growing up at Long John Silver's. My family actually lived at Long John Silver's. And I was like, this is gross. This is stuff. Yeah. And now I'm like, I have a, I guess a refined palate or something because I just, I do shots of that stuff. Yeah.

I didn't like it when I was younger either. And now I fully get it. You got to have your salt as well. And apparently in the UK, they love the curry sauce. Sure. And we'll even go with the ketchup every now and then. Yeah. And then what I always think of fish and chips being

served in because it's a street food like through and through, even though there's chip shops, like it was originally from the streets, you know what I'm saying? And it would be served, and I think even in the chip shops too, it would be served wrapped up in yesterday's newspaper, which originates in World War II, where paper was in short supply. So they, somebody figured out, well, we'll just use

yesterday's newspapers to serve fish and chips in this kind of cone, lined up in a cone, dumped some chips, almost said fries. I'm sorry, UK. Also, I'm sorry about Brexit. And then put some fried fish, usually fried battered cod on top, and there's your fish and chips. But apparently that went out in the Thatcher era.

I'm sorry about Thatcher too. Yeah. I wondered about people walking around in dear old Lunderhood with like newspaper ink getting on their chip. I wonder if that happened. I don't know. I'll bet it did have to do with something with becoming

a little more health conscious. Like this printer's ink soaking into the hot oil that we're ingesting is probably not good for us. Highly toxic. Sure. And all of the third arms that children were growing in the UK suddenly went away. That's right.

You got anything else? No. I'm just going to shout out Gales. That was the first fish and chip place that I ever went in London back when I first went in the mid 90s. And I am looking right now, as you can see, it is still open. You're nice. And that is in Notting Hill.

And I didn't, that was before the moving Notting Hill. So I was cool before country was cool. Right. We need to get you a Gales t-shirt. And what was the name of the lobster roll place? Sea salt. Sea salt. The letter sea salt gourmet shop.

Oh, that is cute. We need to get you those t-shirts. OK. Let's do it. Well, you can read a pretty interesting article by Dave Ruse on how stuff works about fish and chips. And that means, since I said that, short stuff is over. The stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio's

How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Or listen to your favorite shows.