Database Software

I have words in my database that contain statements like fish and chips, fish & chips.

If your looking for the fish & chips it will return fine with "fish and chips" , "fish \& chips",fish & chips", "fish \and chips"

However, if your looking for fish and chips it works fine with all of the ones listed above except the \& and I'm unsure why it does not return because special words are supposed to be escaped

I would like to be able to type in either of the above statements and get both of them back.

I know that if you use the default stoplist it doesn't index the "and" so I used an empty stoplist and it still does not work. I tried to use the thesaurus to link the word and to & but that didn't work either. I also set my preferences to use the printjoin for the & so that means that it will be index. Maybe I'm not understanding something.

Can someone please help?

Thanks
Jeff