Maeryk wrote:Pastys are all over.. and some were fish..
Thank you for your help, but filled pastry is irrelevant to my question.
The same kind of thing which, as Ogedei notes, later came to be English fastfood together with fried potatoes
Ogedei wrote:Stop trying to document fish and chips!
Ogedei,
We should not jump to bad conclusions about our friends. I would have thought that by now you know me a bit better than that - at least enough to give the benefit of the doubt on my purposes.
But yes -- that kind of fish.
Without the chips.
If you realy want to know what prompted the question,
A wee bit ago I saw an article that atributed the battered, fried fish in "fish and chips" to Jewish refugees from Spain and Portugal who came into England at the time of Cromwell.
Later, by sheerest coincidence, I saw a reference to a letter by Thomas Jefferson where he tells about eating fried fish in England as "fish fried in the Jewish fashion"
Yesterday, again by complete coincidence, I saw a reference to the same in the Talmud -- rather, the Talmud (complete circa 5th cenutry) mentions the name of a dish and Rashi (12 century France) explains that this is fish fried in flour.
So, if we assume that Rashi had a valid tradition for his learning (and there is no reason not to), this puts the battered fish in Jewish Babylonia by the 5th century -- and, whether you believe him or not, it certainly puts the battered fish in Jewish France in the Crusades period.
So, I got to wandering whether anyone else fried their fish this way --
It would be amusing if the two things the Jews gave the world were the Bible and batter-fried fish.
This certainly seems to be the case for England and America at the least.