Fish Butty

A fish butty is what you make when the chip shop has given you more fish than you want on a fork. The fillet is the proper fried article, a piece of cod or haddock in a wet batter dropped into hot fat until the coating sets into a hard golden shell over flake, and that fillet goes between soft bread with butter and very little else. The sandwich is the seated, plated portion turned back into something you can carry: no knife, no peas, no chips, just the fish and the bread and the slick of fat between them. Everything the build does is in service of getting that battered fillet to the mouth on bread without the shell going soft on the way.

The work is in taming a coating that sheds steam and grease. A battered fillet seals hot moisture under its crust, so it sits a moment before it is laid down, long enough to stop the steam wilting the shell from within but not so long that the fish loses its heat. It is broken to the footprint of the bread rather than left whole, so the slice settles flat and closes clean over it instead of perching on a ridge. A plain soft slice is the deliberate choice, set to yield to the fish and to take up a measured amount of the oil the batter gives off, going dense beneath while the top stays dry; butter to the edges slows that soak enough to hold the base together for the few bites it lasts. Salt and malt vinegar go on the fish before the lid, the vinegar cutting the fried weight from the centre out.

Each part fails in its own way under a careless hand. A fillet still spitting from the fryer steams the bread to a grey blanket before the first bite; one left to cool turns the shell leathery and the fat to a cold film. Bread left unbuttered wicks the grease straight up and goes to paste; a crusty roll fights the soft flake and shreds the roof of the mouth. Vinegar overdone soaks the crumb to wet wadding; underdone leaves the fried fish heavy and flat. The slab of fish has to be broken level or it rides high and the bread skids off it. The butty is built for the few minutes after it is wrapped and is eaten in both hands before any of that goes wrong.

Unwrap one and the paper has gone translucent with oil and warm in the palm. The shell breaks under the teeth with a soft give rather than a sharp snap, batter being thick and oil-laden where a breadcrumb would crackle, then the hot white flake floods out behind it. Malt vinegar reaches the nose first, sharp through the steam, and the bread underneath has already drunk a little of it. The bite is soft fish in soft bread with the one chewy seam of batter between, salt and vinegar bright on top of the fried richness, the underside of the bread the heaviest and most savoury mouthful where the oil has gathered.

Reading the takeaway as everyday food rather than treat is the whole posture of the thing, the way a chip-shop tea gets stretched or salvaged. It belongs to the same counters and the same paper as fish and chips, and ordering the fish on bread instead of with chips is a frugal move as much as a hungry one, a way to turn a portion into a meal you eat walking. The malt vinegar and the wrapping paper carry the whole thing in the chippy register, and the fish that goes in shifts with the map: haddock through the north of England and Scotland, cod across the south, the same sandwich tasting faintly of a different fish depending on which county's fryer it came from.

The variations are the rest of the fryer's output between bread, and the changing bread under it. The same battered fillet on a soft floured Lancashire roll is the fish barm, the regional reading where the roll is the point. A scampi butty carries breaded scampi instead; a fish cake sandwich is built on the potato-and-fish patty; a battered sausage or a spam fritter runs a different fried thing through the same bread. The breaded fish finger sandwich is the freezer version of the idea, lighter and tidier, and sits in its own entry. None of those is the chip shop's own fish put plainly between sliced white the way this one is.

The portion that became a sandwich

The fish butty has no birth date of its own because it is downstream of the fried-fish trade rather than an invention in itself. That trade has two rival cradles. Joseph Malin is generally credited with opening the earliest combined fryer of fish and chips, in the Bow district of London's East End around 1860, selling fried fish in the Jewish pescado frito tradition alongside chips. A Mr Lees is said to have done the same in Mossley, near Oldham in Lancashire, around 1863, and which of the two came first has never been firmly settled.

Fried fish itself is older than the pairing with chips. Sephardic Jewish immigrants brought the technique of frying fish in batter to England well before either shop, and chips arrived separately, fried potato appearing in print in England by the mid-nineteenth century. The two trades fused into the fish-and-chip shop in those early-1860s years, and from the moment battered fish was sold cheap over a counter, putting a piece of it between bread was an obvious frugal move that needed no inventor.

The fish in the butty still divides on the old north-south line: haddock is the standard across the north of England and Scotland, cod the southern choice, a split older than living memory and visible in any chip shop's fryer. The sandwich rode the explosion of fish-and-chip shops after 1900, when their number ran into the tens of thousands, but it never acquired a maker or a date, because it is the sort of thing people too busy eating cheap hot food never bothered to record.