TOM JACKSON52 The Times Magazine
My great-grandfather didn’t come quite
from Ukraine – which would have been poetic- but from Plonsk, in neighbouring Poland
(born in 1885, old Harry was one year ahead
of a certain David Ben-Gurion in cheder or
Hebrew school, and thus may or may not
have given the future founding father of Israel
wedgies), and, after emigrating here around
the turn of the century, had some modest
success with a wet fish concern before moving
into what we have always called “the oil
business”, to capitalise on the great British
fish and chips boom of the early 20th century.
In the years after the First World War,
Harry’s son, my grandpa Sam, used to ride
the horse and cart with him on his drop-offs
around Islington and the old East End from
the headquarters of H Coren Edible Oils in
Packington Street, and as recently as 2013,
reviewing a fish and chip place on Upper Street,
I met an elderly Jewish guy who recalled
unloading out the back with my grandfather
in the 1930s: “You’d pay for a dozen barrels
and it wasn’t till Sam had driven off that you
noticed he’d only left you 11.” (I maintain a
similar invoicing principle to this day, as the
Times accounts department will attest.)
Third, the death of fish and chips will
be a disaster for me professionally, because
fish and chips, in the current climate, is
really the only kind of food I am culturally
permitted to review. For just as in acting,
where it is no longer permissible to portray
on stage or screen anyone other than who
Eating out Giles Coren
mong other topical concerns, the
catering world is in a terrible panic
at the moment about the future of
fish and chips, as a Ukraine-related
rise in cooking oil prices threatens to
hammer the final nails into the coffin
of Britain’s national dish, whose dead
body was already being boxed up for
burial anyway, on account of climate change,
soaring food prices and the collapse of deep-sea
fish stocks. And if fish and chips does go under,
it will be a sad day for me in at least three
different ways. First, it will be sad because
I am an investor in a small chain of (excellent)
sustainable fish and chip shops along the
southwest coast of Britain, which has done
very nicely over the past five or ten years and
is very much part of my income plan for a
retirement that, frankly, cannot come too soon.
Second, it will be a family tragedy. For
back when we Central European Jews in exile
were inventing your national dish (you’re
welcome) by serving up the fried fish we had
lived on back home for centuries with fried
chipped potatoes sourced from our poor Irish
neighbours down on the docks, it was the
Coren family that supplied the cooking oil- now in such short supply – in which it all
was fried. Well, some of it.
A
‘As an Anglo-Polish
Jew of 52 , I’m really
only culturally
permitted to review
fish and chips now’
Richoux