Beef Dripping Fish and Chips

A grumble, a ramble and a recipe

There are over 11,000 fish and chip shops in the UK, so it’s a fair assumption that aside from good old fashioned home cooking, fish and chips are the nations most eaten and cherished food. Fish and chips aren’t quite what they used to be though. Aside from batter that is more often that not from a pre-mixed bag, 99% of the UK’s fish and chips are fried in vegetable oil. It’s a fact that saddens me almost as much as the astonishing rate in which country pubs are closing and being turned into soulless homes.

Until sometime in the mid-seventies most if not all chippies were frying their catch in British beef dripping (the rendered fat from beef, known also as Tallow in the US.) Beef dripping not only exceeds industrial oil in taste, but it is much healthier for you. Dripping is a minimally processed fat made by slowly rendering raw beef suet into a liquid, straining and then storing as a solid fat. It is shelf stable and can be heated to very high temperatures without oxidizing, which we have learnt is a huge part of why vegetable and seed oils are destroying health worldwide.

“There’s nothing like the smell of a fish and chip shop that fries in beef dripping. The way it seems to be undetectable from the road until you’re right up close, and then – bam! – it floods your nostrils; sharp, barnyard, overripe, like tropical fruit left out in a bowl in the heat. The afterlife of beef dripping is long: it subsists in the back of your throat, not as an organ chord that slowly fades away, but in waves, like grief or acid reflux, through cups of tea, cigarettes, second meals, brushing your teeth and a night’s sleep.”

- Jonathan Nunn from The Last Guardians of Beef Dripping Fish and Chips at Vittlesmagazine.com