Aotearoa and Australia · Volume 04, The Roast, the Dairy and the Corner Shop

Fish and chips

Name: Fish and chips
Total time: 45 min
Yield: Serves 4
Cuisine: Pākehā and General New Zealand Food
Ingredients: as available potatoes, for chips; 4 white fish fillets, hoki, tarakihi, blue cod or snapper depending on region; as available plain flour and water, for batter; as needed oil, for deep-frying; to taste salt

New Zealand

Illustration

Time: 45 minutes

Researched: 8 sources cited

Te Ara dates the country's first fish and chip shops to well before the First World War, Friday being fish night for many New Zealanders, Catholics especially, barred from meat on Fridays until 1965. The Spinoff traces the first specifically documented shop to James Henry Pomeroy, a Cornish-born Invercargill fishmonger, who opened the London Fried Fish Shop on Kelvin Street, Invercargill, in May 1903 with an imported deep fryer.

by New Zealand

Chinese immigration reached New Zealand as goldfields labour: twelve labourers were brought to the Otago fields in 1866, and by 1869 over 2,000 had arrived, nearly all from Guangdong province, for what they called the "New Gold Mountain." As the Otago fields exhausted between roughly 1880 and 1913, sons and young relatives of the original prospectors moved into market gardening, leasing land, often from Māori, and working in kinship groups; by 1899 about 1,390 hectares nationally were under market garden cultivation, spreading to Pukekohe and Levin as roads and railways developed. A genuine split then opened between home and restaurant cooking: Chinese households kept more authentic Cantonese technique at home, while restaurant kitchens, some of which reportedly served fish and chips and steak alongside or instead of Chinese dishes simply to survive, progressively adapted to Pākehā taste, producing the specifically New Zealand-Chinese takeaway repertoire this chapter documents below.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Serves 4. About 45 minutes.

Ingredients

as available potatoes, for chips
4 white fish fillets, hoki, tarakihi, blue cod or snapper depending on region
as available plain flour and water, for batter
as needed oil, for deep-frying
to taste salt

Method

Cut potatoes into chips; fry in oil in two stages, a lower-temperature blanch until tender, then a hotter finish for colour and crunch.
Dip white fish fillets, hoki, tarakihi, blue cod or snapper depending on region, in a plain flour-and-water batter.
Deep-fry until the batter is golden and the fish is just cooked through.
Serve wrapped in paper, salted, with the chips.

What a modern chef changes

Two-temperature chips and a dehydrated fish surface

This chapter's own technique work, extending Rung 2.

Method

Dehydrate the fish fillet's surface for 15 to 20 minutes before battering, for a drier surface and a crisper, better-adhering fry. Rung 2.
Blanch the chips at 130 to 140°C, rest, then finish at 180°C, the two-temperature discipline a chip shop already applies and a home cook usually skips. Rung 2.
Rest the fried fish briefly on a rack, not paper, so trapped steam does not soften the underside of the batter before serving.

Notes

No single named chef's fish-and-chip recipe was found with comparable technical detail; The Local on Waiheke Island is documented serving a beer-battered, locally caught snapper with thick-cut chips as a real, if lightly reported, elevated version.

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