Mazo coated fish here in NW London, fat golden chips in a paper rose doused in vinegar with a heavy dose of salt, but nothing compared to hot and fat chips doused in curry sauce from the Lobster Pot in Liverpool accompanied by a can of brew and some weed
Don't please. I am salivating. One of the things that people in the UK and Ireland do not realize is how lucky they are to have varieties of potatoes. I have never seen anything other than the classifications of Red/Russet/Yellow/White in North America. Perhaps there are some regional growers of Kerr's Pink or Maris Piper but they certainly do not stock the supermarkets with them and I have never seen them in farmer's markets.
Weird, that really surprises me. Even the petrol (gas) station across the road (highway) from my flat (apartment) sells generic white, generic red, new, Charlotte, sweet (yams?), and Maris Piper. Maybe one of jersey royal & king Edward too, I'm not sure.
Potatoes are shockingly cheap too, for some reason I suddenly 'noticed' that at the weekend, around 40p/kg, (uh.. 25c/lb ish) that's crackers (cookies for cheese) isn't it?
I'm sure there's other things you have or have variety in that we don't, but I wouldn't fancy not having a choice of potatoes. Though I almost always get Maris Piper to be honest, so it's not even really about choice as such, just knowing what I like and what I'm getting, I only buy 'white' if there's nothing specific (and more appropriate) available.
Sometimes 'white' will tell you what the actually are (this batch) on the date/producer label bit, or what they might be a mix of, which is nice.
Well, that's more than I've previously written or thought about potatoes...
It's hard to find truly deep variety in potatoes in the US. I don't think people buy enough of the "non-standard" forms to really justify selling them to consumers (restaurants are a different story). There are a few exceptions, for example Monterey Market in Berkeley, CA has a wide range of potato variants (fingerling, banana, purple) depending on what's available.
At my farmers market this past weekend 1 farmers had 9 different varietals of potato including some I would have guessed were radishes. The stall next had another 7 with only 1 overlap.
Is it possible you are in an environment where potatoes aren’t very profitable crops? Because I see lots of variety in potatoes routinely and “North America” is a very big place to be saying anything about the food ways.
I have to be honest, I don't know of anywhere in Britain or Ireland that has risen to the challenge of bake and shark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs_3wuEjXq0 (although, full disclosure, I haven't had the chance to eat one myself yet). This should really be a source of national self-examination in Scotland.
I’ve always thought you could make a tidy profit by opening an authentic chippy in the Bay Area. There is nothing like that here and it’s delicious. There’s a food truck in SF that’s owned by Brits but the fish is done in the American style (3-4 smaller pieces vs. one huge slab of cod cooked in a room-sized fryer, as you’d get from a real chippy)
The Edinburgh Castle on Geary is pretty good, memory is fuzzy on how authentic it is. I think you order and they run down an alley to pickup from a neighbouring place.. A fun place to spend Hogmanay (if things are open by then)!
It'd be interesting to see what you can get where laid out on a map
Growing up in the north west I'd never even heard of battered sausages until I was in home counties. Conversely, I don't recall the southern chippies having steak puddings; and gravy on chips also seems regional
Perhaps because they were listed as pies? ;) I grew up in Dorset with steak pies available, but it'd be an unusual order for sure, they definitely wouldn't sell many, you'd probably waiting a few minutes for them to.. microwave it I suppose.
I can't really think of anything we had that's region specific, mostly just fish and chips, with fish cakes, sausages, pea fritters, and occasionally pies also available.
Definitely no gravy, except at Chinese takeaways, (along with 'curry sauce' and sweet & sour) on greasy fries of course, not chippy chips.
Quite possibly, it's interesting how local these things can be. I'd not really even considered that places wouldn't sell battered sausages. It would be almost like going in and finding out that they didn't offer fish battered - it just seemed so standard. I guess while I've lived in a variety of cities I've only been to a fairly small number of chip shops, something I'd not considered until now.
In my hometown in Ireland, potato scallops were maybe the fourth most popular order after regular chips, curry chips and battered sausages. After leaving for Dublin, I found they weren't that widespread elsewhere in the country. Then I found them in a town near Leeds when visiting a friend. I don't think they were as popular there, as I had to explain the concept (basically battered potato slices) to my friend who'd lived there a good period of time, but was still glad to find them a little more widespread than my first post-moving out destination implied
People trying to claim regional ownership of such an obviously winning combination as chips, cheese, beans and/or gravy is absurd. Even the Canadians got in on that one.
There are many dishes to be discovered in the Central Belt, but my favourite is the hoagie wrap - chips, cheese, Doner, and sauce all wrapped in flatbread for ease of consumption.
I do miss the motherland sometimes. I'm all about gravy but wrapping a pie in a cob/barm/buttie/etc does seem a bit odd. Maybe not after a few brews though!
Yeah, but I also kind of get it. I think a but of bread to soak up the pie gravy could be quite nice! I would probably butter the buns though for the initial bite!
As an American I must say... bravo. Truly these are some next level fried foods. Deep fried oreos and deep fried butter don't hold a greasy candle to this stuff.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I know scraps as the small bits of batter which are left in the deep fryer after cooking battered fish. After a while there is a fair amount in there and you can ask to have them fished out (pun intended) and served with whatever you were ordering.
