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  Over the past five centuries, English food has been transformed by global trade, technological change, and social upheaval. In the 16th and 17th centuries, even ordinary English diets began to include imported spices and luxury items. By the Elizabethan era, cooks already spiced sauces heavily with pepper, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and saffron worldhistory.org , reflecting long-distance trade. Sugar – first noted in England in 1099 – remained a costly luxury well into the 1700s english-heritage.org.uk . At home, staple meals still centred on bread, pottage (thick vegetable-and-grain stews) and seasonal meats or fish. Wealthy tables featured elaborate meat feasts with multiple roast courses and spiced pies, while the poor managed on plain pottage, salted fish or porridge. Foreign visitors of the 1500s remarked that English peasants were surprisingly well-fed and the rich noticeably corpulent compared to Europeans worldhistory.org . (Indeed, heavy meat consumption by ...

 I’ve spent more than four decades teaching modern British history at the University of Leeds, but my fascination with our cultural heritage began not in the classroom—but in the kitchen. Or, more precisely, in the corner shop on Kirkgate Market, where I queued as a lad with a shilling in hand for the best Friday night fish and chips in town. To many, fish and chips is just a dish. To me—and to much of Britain—it’s history on a plate. A History Drenched in Vinegar and Wrapped in Newspaper The origin of fish and chips isn’t entirely straightforward, though it is thoroughly British. The dish is the culinary marriage of two immigrant foods: fried fish, introduced by Jewish refugees from Spain and Portugal in the 17th century, and fried potato chips, likely brought to England by way of France or Belgium. It was the Industrial Revolution, however, that truly made them a pair. In the north of England—Leeds, Manchester, and the like—chips were cheap, filling, and could be cooked in bu...