Notable Sandwiches #65: The Fishcake Butty
On haddock, hidden Jews, and the alchemy of rage
Welcome back to Notable Sandwiches, the series where I, alongside my editor David Swanson, trip merrily through the bizarre document that is Wikipedia’s List of Notable Sandwiches, in alphabetical order. This week, a British chip shop special: the Fishcake Butty.
Today I got some nuclear-level bad news. This was just a day after I returned home from a long trip to find that all my potato plants were dead due to the wildfire smoke that killed the sun while I was gone. Alongside the phlox and dill and a particular dream I’d had. I was grumpy, flummoxed, even furious, and then I realized I had to write this column about something called the Fishcake Butty. Presumably along with the non-British audience of this column, I simply said to myself: “What the fuck is a fishcake butty?”
I had frantically pulled up the sad shriveled yellow plants only to find out that my hoped-for harvest was comprised, in totality, by two tiny potatoes and two proto-potatoish orbs considerably smaller than the diameter of my pinky nail. I would be laughed out of a chip shop with that bounty. And I am out of dill seeds, and my heart has an ugly, angry rhythm to it, the kind of total rage that is difficult for me to express, perhaps due to my female socialization, or perhaps due to the fact that professional obligation requires me to shunt it into other venues like this column. About the fishcake butty. A ridiculous name for a sandwich. On a ridiculous day.
It seems to me that the British cuisine we have thus far covered falls largely into the category of “put fried stuff inna bun” and it’s difficult to wax eloquent on this subject. Something about the boiling oil burns the words away.
Since I am obliged to define it, a fishcake butty—also known as a “chippy fishcake”—is a dish of minced or ground seafood or fish mixed with a starchy, binding ingredient and fried until golden and then served in a bun. “Butty” is a UK term for a casual sort of buttered sandwich on a roll that in my New York accent comes out like “buddy” every time. We all could use a friend.
Anger makes your body feel like it’s bound in starch and set on fire. You might as well be a scrod (the fish most commonly used in fish cakes). Another ridiculous name.
Incidentally Jews gave humanity fish & chips after being driven from the Iberian Penisula, where fried fish on Fridays was a commonality (as was the hidden Jewish faith of many alleged Christians); the first chippy in the UK was founded by a Portuguese Jew and abided for a century. Nineteenth-century cookbooks evince this history: in lieu of lard, fish fried in oil was known as the “Jewish fashion.” Thomas Jefferson identified the dish as such, and described his enjoyment of it on a voyage to London.
Think how angry you’d be after being driven out of a whole peninsula for your faith—but you invent fish and chips anyway. You fry the fish. And the anger courses through you as invention, as passion. And you survive. And you create a food now embraced as the quintessence of Britishness by a British public infamous for its quiet and omnipresent antisemitism. And you keep frying and keep quiet and survive.
I have spent a lot of my life being the target of rage because I was young and small, and later accepted it as my just due. I try not to do the same to those I love now, and so today I am angry at innocent fishcakes. Who are they to be safely ensconced in their bun and certain of their place in the world when I am condemned to precarity? Who are they to be so beloved, to always give you precisely what you need, when I am so far from such precision? At such times I wish I was ground scrod in a boiling bath. Ready to be supped on and be done. But I swim on instead through these bad shoals.
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It feels particularly cruel to be sour at the world in summer when the sun comes in a flood and the streets are full of people laughing. There was a DJ in front of a cell phone store on my street and kids were dancing to the music so their braids bounced. I felt sealed in cellophane and breathless.
Sometimes it’s harder to come home than you thought it would be, like every bad thing waited in stasis in your absence and then came back to life.
But I still have seeds in store: bachelor button and rosemary, bush-cherry tomato, and the Brussels sprouts survived and the wildflowers bloomed. As I dug into my seed urn while writing this column I found a packet of dill seeds to replace the dead dill: the perfect herb for fish. There are still three months of the best sun; still earth; still time.
Scrod just means small cod or haddock sold in bulk to be fried. The haddock is less mottled than the cod, distinguished by the black thumbprint pattern above its smallest fins, on either side of its body. They were drawn by Linnaeus; they can grow to three feet long and live thirteen years; they migrate around Iceland in huge schools. Such a thing to split and fillet and grind and bind and fry. Perhaps they would be angry if they knew.
And still. All across the UK you can get what you need at a fish and chip shop. When the anger passes comes the hunger, and the need for a hot good thing in bread in your hand.
Once again, your writing, even in anger, even on something as common as a fish sandwich, shines. Every week my initial thought is, why should I read this, who cares about a random sandwich, and every week I am surprised and delighted at your ability to magically turn each essay into so much more.
Thank you.
Excellent. A joy to read and imagine, including your anger. I'm sorry about your plants, it's so disheartening to come home to problems. Dill grows quickly and just smelling my rosemary plants immediately relaxes me. Peace and love.