Bubble and Squeak
Chop some boiled white cabbage, season it with pepper and salt, and toss it in butter. Pepper and broil some slices of cold salted beef-if underdone, so much the better. Put the cabbage into a dish, lay round it the slices of beef, garnish it if you will with slices of carrot, and serve it very hot.
A leftovers dish, and the instructions assume a larder that most kitchens no longer keep. The main adjustments are about what "salted beef" means and how hard to work the cabbage.
- Cold salted beefThis means leftover boiled salt beef or brisket from a corned joint, sliced cold. Deli-style corned beef or a piece of cooked brisket both work; sliced roast beef will do but will taste less of the cure and needs more salt in the cabbage.
- Boiled white cabbageA firm white or green cabbage, boiled or steamed until tender and drained thoroughly. Wet cabbage steams rather than fries and will never take on colour, so press it dry in a colander before chopping.
- Toss it in butter, but harder than that soundsToss it in butter -- the name is usually explained by the noise the dish makes in the pan. The recipe asks only that the cabbage be tossed in butter, but a wide pan and hot butter, with the cabbage left alone for a few minutes at a time, will let some patches catch and give more flavour than constant stirring.
- Broiling the beef"Broil" here is a gridiron over coals; a hot grill pan or a heavy dry skillet is the equivalent. Slices about a quarter-inch thick need barely a minute a side — they are already cooked, and long heat turns salt beef stringy.
- "If underdone, so much the better"Most likely this means the joint was boiled short of falling apart, so the slices stay pink and juicy when seared. It is not an instruction to serve raw beef.
- No potatoModern British bubble and squeak is mostly mashed potato with cabbage folded in and fried as a cake. This older version has no potato at all: cabbage in the middle, beef around the edge. If you add potato you are cooking a later dish.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantities; roughly half a medium cabbage with enough sliced beef to ring the dish will feed two to three as a supper dish. Serve on a warmed platter, as the recipe's "very hot" implies -- cold cabbage and butter set unpleasantly. Mustard or a sharp pickle suits it, though the recipe asks only for carrot as garnish.
The name is onomatopoeic, generally traced to the sound of the ingredients bubbling in the pot and then squeaking in the hot fat, and it appears in English print from the late eighteenth century — Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue lists it as beef and cabbage fried together. What is striking about this version is that beef, not potato, is the point: it is a way of using up a boiled salt joint, a common enough centrepiece in households that salted their own beef and ate the leftovers cold for days. As home curing fell away and potatoes became cheap, the dish drifted toward the fried potato-and-cabbage cake now served with a fry-up, and the beef dropped out. Kettner's Book of the Table (1877), written largely by E. S. Dallas around the London restaurateur's name, records the older arrangement.