Wordish/Wordful Wednesday - Of Chippies and 99

I found these photos in a missing SD card while cleaning out my handbag.
If my memory serves me correctly, I think these pics were taken somewhere around the Tower of London.

Almost everyone around us was snacking on fish and chips and there was this long queue behind one particular fish & chips kiosk. I was reminded of an ex-classmate who travels to London every year just to get her fish & chips fix. How crazy is that? If I had her moolah, I would prefer to visit a different country every year.
I'm not a big fan of fish & chips but I thought I'd give it a go.

There were several chippies (British slang for fish & chips shops) in the area.




This no-frills British classic meal came in a cardboad box printed with newspaper motifs - a clever substitute for newspaper wrapping. Fish and chips meals traditionally came wrapped in a couple of layers of newspaper, but concerns over ink poisoning phased out this practice.

Salt and vinegar are traditionally sprinkled over fish and chips at the time it is served in chippies in the UK.


Blimey! That was bloody marvelous!

Interestingly, Britain's national dish is chicken tikka masala and not fish & chips! Controversy raged throughout the whole of Britain after former foreign secretary Robin Cooke hailed Chicken Tikka Masala as 'Britain's true national dish.'

Some interesting facts and figures about fish & chips

* 300 million portions of fish and chips are eaten in Britain each year.
* There are more than 10,000 chippies in the UK.
* It is said that Joseph Malin opened the first chippy in London in 1860.

And no visit to Old Blighty is complete if you haven't tasted their 99 Flake.

A 99 Flake ice cream, or more commonly known as 99, is an ice cream cone with a Cadbury Flake inserted into it. The ice cream is usually vanilla flavoured. They are traditionally sold by ice cream vans, parlours and now by the world's first amphibious ice cream van - The HMS Flake 99.



Here's an excerpt from the Daily Mail.

The ‘HMS Flake 99′, which has a top speed of five knots and can also run on land, was created to mark National Ice Cream Week and to emphasise the problem of the increasing number of exclusion zones and decreasing amount of ice cream vans on the roads.
The number of vans falled from 20,000 to just 5,000 over the past fifty years due to growing number of bans from housing estates, parks and outside schools because of concerns about noise pollution and childhood obesity, reports Daily Mail.
After a nationwide tour of Britain’s beaches, HMS Flake 99 will be heading to the canals of Venice next year.


There are many theories as to how the 99 got its name.

Here's an extract from BBC NEWS.

The ice cream in question has gone by that name since 1930, when Cadbury's launched a shorter version of its Flake bar - called a Flake 99 - for the ice cream trade.

Which does rather seem to blow one theory - that the bar is exactly 99mm long - out of the water. The UK is only now edging towards metrification - 70-odd years ago, everything was in imperial measures.

Ditto the suggestion that back in the day they cost 99p. True in the 1990s, but in 1930, nothing cost 99p - it was pre-decimalisation, remember.

Another theory goes that the initials of ice cream are IC, which is one way to write 99 in Roman numerals. But the convention is to write it XCIX - but it's possible this was ignored or not known.

Found this in Cadbury's FAQs
In the days of the monarchy in Italy the King has a specially chosen guard consisting of 99 men, and subsequently anything really special or first class was known as "99" - and that his how "99" Flake came by its name.