Source.

An intriguing letter from Rob Wills in the LRB (26th December 2024):

Bill Lancaster mentions his friend John Walton’s search for the first fish and chip shop in England and that he discovered a likely candidate in the East End (Letters, 24 October). This location is supported by The Epicure’s Almanack, Ralph Rylance’s comprehensive guide to eating and drinking in London, published in 1815. Reporting on Shoreditch, Rylance noted: ‘Here are Israelitish butchers, fishmongers and cooks. The latter exhibit in their windows fish fried, or rather, perhaps, boiled in oil until they look brown and savoury.’ The book’s modern editor, Janet Ing Freeman, adds that the food ‘may have been some version of the battered fish fried in olive oil popular among Sephardic Jews, often named as an ancestor of today’s fish and chips’. As for the chips, the earliest mention in English is in William Kitchiner’s cookbook The Cook’s Oracle (1817), though Belgium and France remain locked in furious dispute as to who actually invented them.

The two components seem to have become a winning combo by the 1860s. By 1910 there were 25,000 fish-and-chip shops in the UK. For more, see e.g. here, here, and here. Cf. the first curry house in London (1810, under Bloody foreigners), and the ancestry of pizza, under You say tomato.

Fish and chips wrapped in newspaper (probably not the LRB) is one of the classic tropes of Binmenism. I note with pleasure that transliterated into Turkish, chips would come out as cips, and fish as fiş (actually representing the French fiche!)—cf. şef, chef or conductor.