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Bubble and Squeak
Dissolve two or three ounces of butter or beef dripping in a frying-pan. Cut some thin slices of cold boiled or roast meat, and fry them slightly, a nice brown. Mix some cold greens of any kind with a few mashed potatoes, shredded onion, if liked, salt, and pepper, and fry, stirring all the time. Serve hot, with the vegetables round the dish, and the meat in the middle. Fry for about twenty minutes. Probable cost, from 4d. to 6d. without the meat.
A leftovers dish rather than a formula: the quantities are whatever the Sunday joint and the vegetable dish left behind. A few points of translation are worth making.
- Two to three ounces of fatThat is 4-6 tablespoons of butter or beef dripping, which is generous but correct for a heavy frying pan and a proper crust. The recipe allows either; dripping carries more flavour, though butter is likelier to darken before the twenty minutes are up.
- "Cold greens of any kind"In a Victorian kitchen this meant leftover boiled cabbage, sprouts, kale or spring greens, already fully cooked and squeezed dry. Raw greens will steam rather than fry and leave the mixture wet.
- The twenty minutesThe recipe says to stir all the time and to fry for about twenty minutes. In practice a brown crust forms only where the mixture is pressed flat and left undisturbed for a stretch before turning; constant agitation tends towards hot mash rather than crust.
- Reheating the meatCold cooked beef or mutton needs only a brief pass through the hot fat, coloured on both sides. Held longer it dries and toughens, which is why the recipe says "slightly".
- Cost noteThe 4d. to 6d. is late-Victorian pence and reflects only the vegetables and fat, the meat being assumed already paid for as a previous dinner.
The name is generally traced to the sounds the dish makes in the pan, bubbling as it heats and squeaking as the cabbage hits hot fat; it appears in English print by the late eighteenth century, when it usually meant fried beef laid with fried cabbage rather than the modern mash-and-greens cake. Cassell's version sits squarely in that older tradition, keeping the meat whole in the middle of the dish with the vegetables ranged round it, and reflects the Victorian household's serious interest in the second and third life of a roast. The shift to the potato-heavy patty most British cooks now recognise came later, and the meat gradually dropped out altogether.