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Veal, Bubble and Squeak Of
Take the remains of cooked veal; cut the meat into neat slices, fry these in hot fat, and put them before the fire to keep hot. Take some boiled cabbage or spinach. Fry this also, and when it is quite hot pile it on a dish, and arrange the pieces of meat round it. Send tomato or any kind of piquant sauce to table with the veal. Time to fry the meat and the greens, altogether about a quarter of an hour.
A leftovers dish with almost no fixed quantities — the method matters more than the measurements. The whole thing works in one pan in about fifteen minutes.
- The hinge: the fat must be hotCold veal slices dropped into lukewarm fat will steam and toughen. Get the pan properly hot so the slices take colour in a minute or two per side, then move them off the heat. Veal that is already cooked needs warming and browning, not cooking.
- "Put them before the fire"This means the hearth, where a plate sat in the radiant heat. Use a low oven, around 200F, or a warmed plate under foil.
- FatBeef dripping or lard would have been the usual choice. Butter with a little oil, or the fat skimmed from the veal's own cooking liquid, both work; butter alone will brown too fast at the heat needed.
- The greensThey must be already boiled and, crucially, well drained and squeezed. Wet cabbage or spinach in hot fat spits and then stews. Chop the cabbage roughly before frying so it crisps at the edges.
- Not the usual bubble and squeakThere is no potato here, which is what most cooks now expect in the dish. If you want the potato version, add cold mashed or crushed boiled potato to the cabbage and press it into a cake in the pan.
- Sauce"Piquant" here means sharp — tomato sauce, a mustard sauce, or anything vinegar-based. The dish is fatty and needs the acid; do not skip it.
- YieldUnstated, since it depends on what was left over. Reckon on 4 to 5 oz of sliced meat and a good cup of cooked greens per person.
Bubble and squeak is traditionally said to take its name from the sounds of the ingredients in the pan — the bubbling of the fat and the squeak or hiss of the greens hitting it — and the phrase is attested in English from the 1770s, appearing in cookery books by the early nineteenth century. In its earliest printed forms it was a beef dish: cold boiled salt beef sliced and fried with cabbage, a way of using up Sunday's joint. The all-vegetable potato-and-cabbage cake most people now mean by the name is a later, thriftier development. Cassell's, arranged as a dictionary, treats the name as a method rather than a fixed dish and files a version under each meat it might be made with — which is why veal, a joint that dries out badly on reheating, gets its own entry.