Britain and Ireland · Volume 35, The Pie, the Pluck and the Girder Drink

The Fish Supper

Name: The Fish Supper
Total time: 45 min
Yield: Serves 4
Cuisine: Scotland, the Lowlands and the Central Belt
Ingredients: 200g plain flour; a pinch a pinch of salt; 300ml cold sparkling water or beer, approximately; 4 fillets of haddock or cod, patted dry; 4 large floury potatoes, cut into thick chips; as needed beef dripping, for frying; to taste vinegar and brown sauce, or salt and vinegar, to serve

Italian immigrant Scotland

The fish supper: a golden, deep-fried battered fish fillet resting on a bed of thick-cut golden chips on white paper unfolded flat on a wooden board.

Illustration

Time: 45 minutes

Researched: 10 sources cited

Battered haddock or cod and twice fried chips, built by Italian immigrant families from virtually nothing into the most Scottish meal there is: wrapped in paper, seasoned east or west of the country differently, and in Glasgow, classically, alongside a bottle of ginger.

by Italian immigrant Scotland

The chip shop is not an old Scottish tradition wearing a foreign name; it is, straightforwardly, an Italian one. Pietro Nardini arrived in Renfrewshire from Barga, a Tuscan hill town nicknamed, for the scale of its own emigration, "the most Scottish town in Italy," around 1890, and the fish and ice cream business his sons built in Largs from 1935 is still trading. Glasgow's Val d'Oro, on the site of a restaurant opened in 1875 by the Beltrami family and renamed by the Corvi family in 1938, marked its hundred and fiftieth anniversary in 2025; Jaconelli's on Maryhill Road has served the same ice cream recipe since 1924. Edinburgh's own great Italian chip shop dynasty, Brattisani's, ran continuously in the city for a hundred and fifteen years, from 1889 to 2004, and deserves naming as history even though its last branch has closed. By 1914 Italian families had built roughly four and a half thousand chip shops across Scotland, a network dense enough that the fish supper, wrapped first in paper then in newspaper to hold its heat, paired in Glasgow with "a bottle of ginger," any fizzy soft drink, very often Irn Bru, and seasoned east of the country with vinegar and brown sauce mixed as "chippy sauce" rather than the plain salt and vinegar of the west, became genuinely, permanently Scottish without ever losing the name of the people who built it.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Serves 4. About 45 minutes.

Ingredients

For the batter

200g plain flour
a pinch a pinch of salt
300ml cold sparkling water or beer, approximately

For the fish and chips

4 fillets of haddock or cod, patted dry
4 large floury potatoes, cut into thick chips
as needed beef dripping, for frying
to taste vinegar and brown sauce, or salt and vinegar, to serve

Method

Whisk the flour, salt and cold sparkling water or beer together only briefly, just enough to combine; overworking the batter is what makes it heavy.
Dip the patted-dry haddock or cod fillets into the batter and fry in beef dripping heated to around 180°C for 6 to 8 minutes, until deep golden and crisp, turning once.
Cut the potatoes into thick chips from a floury variety. Blanch them in the same dripping at a lower temperature, around 130°C, until soft but not coloured, then drain.
Fry the chips a second time at the higher 180°C until golden and crisp outside.
Serve wrapped, traditionally in paper, seasoned in the east with vinegar and brown sauce mixed as chippy sauce, in the west with plain salt and vinegar, and in Glasgow, classically, alongside a bottle of ginger.

What a modern chef changes

A dehydrated skin before the first fry, and chips blanched sous vide instead of in oil

Rung 4

Method

Dehydrate the battered fillets briefly before the first fry, just long enough to set a thin, even skin on the batter's surface, so the first fry sets the coating fully before the second, hotter fry crisps it, the same double fry logic the chips already use, applied properly to the fish itself for the first time.
Cut the chips with a mandoline for genuinely even thickness.
Blanch them sous vide in seasoned water before their own two stage fry in beef dripping, for a fondant, evenly cooked interior no amount of simmering in oil reliably achieves.
Reduce a little Irn Bru with malt vinegar to a syrup and offer it as an optional dip alongside the traditional sauce, honestly presented as this chapter's own invention rather than any inherited tradition.

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