To ask if you've heard of a potato scallop

[greathat]

When I was a teenager I'd quite often buy a potato scallop for 20p from the chippy on the walk home from swimming. It was a slice of battered potato and was delicious. Where I live now no one has heard of them. Have you and if yes where do you live? :)

Yes I remember them, Coventry kid here, and they were lovely straight out of the fryer. We also liked what my Devonshire mum called gribbles, the batter bits which we'd have on top of chips. My poor arteries....

I'm in South Australia and its a potato fritter here, potato scallops are sliced potato cooked on the BBQ

Yes, I loved a scollop back in the day.

I'm from West Yorkshire.

I’ve eaten them as long as I can recall for the past 50 odd years.

Always called scallops and available in every takeaway store. Sydney, Australia

Late to this but yes. Grew up in Lancashire. Haven't eaten one since a previous century

These are completely normal in here in Scotland, Asda and Sainsburys sell them in a pack to pop in the oven, or you can get some in the chippy

I'm from Nottingham and have never heard of it. Would like to try one though!

Called a Potato Cake in Victoria, Australia. Called a Scallop in Nsw, Australia.
A scallop here is fish.

Yeah we have them round here, we call them 'specials' for some reason! I think they're 40p each or 3 for £1 at our chippy

Confusingly, in my experience, a 'special' is a large battered fish, so careful what you ask for as it won't be what you expected and will cost considerably more than 40p!

I think it's a Lancashire/Merseyside thing - they're called specials or smacks, depending on where you are. We're in Merseyside and they're known as specials in our town just outside of L'pool and I think in Liverpool itself, but in my hometown in Lancashire, they were smacks or fritters.

All this talk has made me crave one now!

Have trawled through the thread with bated breath and found my tribe half way through - they're smacks to me too, homemade by my grandma back in the fifties, usually served with chips. Sorry, fellow Lancastrians, I've never heard of dabs, but according to the thread smack seems to be the word in Cheshire/south Lancs, including Wigan, which is near where I lived as a child- though grandma was from a more northern part of Lancashire and always called them smacks.

Alma I'm near Blackburn they're dabs to me

I've never heard of these before! I thought the thread was going to be about scalloped potatoes

Midlands. Grew up with them. Dad never went to the chippy without buying us scallops, to be washed down with White's Lemonade. Love 'em and they are still sold at the local chippy, but I have about one a year now. Massively calorific. One great big thick slice of battered, soft potato. Now I want one.

*haven't had one.

In the olden days they used to serve slices of meat or bacon called collops (from Old French escalope).

I strongly suspect that slices of potato were also originally know as collops.

Ooh! Just found this:

There is another explanation for how scalloped potatoes came to be called that. An older English word, "collops", meant, among other things, slices of meat. It's very closely related to the French word, escalope. The word came to mean slices in general, generally thick. In Yorkshire, a dish called "collops" was thick slices of potato, fried until brown.

At the same time, there was linguistic confusion between "scollop" and "collop" -- with "escalope" no doubt stirred into the mix by anyone who knew French cooking terms. Hannah Glasse (1708-1770) in The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747) lists a recipe for "Collups of Oysters", which is oysters cooked in scallop shells. This may show the start of the confusion between the word "scollops" (as it was then spelt) and "collops."

www.cooksinfo.com/scallop

Yes but I thought they were sliced and friend potatoes ( or that’s how Dad made them - he is a Yorkshireman !) - no batter !

My Auntie Joyce (not my actual
Auntie - my childminder) made them for tea every night (or at least in my memory she did) with bacon. I live in South Wales

YANBU. My Mum used to make them for us at home - as others have said, they're potato slices in batter, fried.

Not as good as a Yorkshire fishcake, mind - which is two slices of potato, with fish in the middle, battered and fried.

Had never heard of them until I moved from East Anglia to the North West coast - where they were in every seaside chippy. Was only telling my children about them a couple of weeks ago (back down south now) - they thought I was a madwoman!

Potato pakora

Oh yes. The first time I went to my inlaws' for tea, DMIL asked if I liked scallops. They all fell about laughing when I said I loved seafood. I'm a Geordie transplanted to West Yorkshire.

And as for the Yorkshire fishcake, with the two slices of potato and fish in the middle - we called that a patty. The stuff I've had to get used to!

Oh yes love them! Get them in most chippys in Liverpool!