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Bubble and Squeak
1 lb. cold boiled salt beef 4 ozs. (1/2 cup) butter or I boiled cabbage drippings Pepper Cut the salt beef in thin slices and sprinkle it over with a little pepper; melt the butter or drippings in a frying-pan. When hot put the beef into it, and fry on both sides until it is a golden color; then take up, put the pieces of meat between two plates, and keep them hot over boiling water. Chop the cabbage, put it into the pan in which the beef was fried, and fry it for five minutes; turn it out in the center of a hot dish and arrange the slices of beef round. Serve very hot.
If liked, cold mashed potatoes, shredded onions and a little vinegar may be added.
Bubble and squeak is the fanciful name applied to an old English dish of fried beef and cabbage. "When 'midst the frying-pan, in accents savage, The beef so surly quarrels with the cabbage."
Dr. Kitchener set the lines to music, and furnished a sauce for the dish. Even George Augusta Sala, who was both a clever cook and a conscientious epicure, was very fond of boiled beef when it was served à la Bubble and Squeak.
1 lb. liver
A frugal supper dish built on Sunday's leftovers, and it still works that way. The instructions are sound; only the ingredients need translating.
- Salt beefBeef cured in brine, usually brisket or silverside — close to American corned beef, sold as a deli cut or as a whole raw joint in a brine pack. It is not tinned corned beef, which will fall apart in the pan. A pound of sliced cooked beef serves two generously.
- The cabbage"1 boiled cabbage" means an ordinary head, roughly 1.5-2 lb, boiled until tender and drained. Squeeze it hard in a towel before chopping; wet cabbage steams in the pan instead of browning, which is the whole point of the dish.
- DrippingsBeef dripping, the fat saved from a roast. Butter works as the recipe says, but scorches faster over the high heat the browning wants. Half the 4 oz is plenty in a modern non-stick pan.
- Heat and timingThe five minutes given for the cabbage assumes a hot pan and a thin layer. Press it down, leave it alone until the underside catches, then turn — stirring constantly gives you warm cabbage rather than the crisp brown crust that makes bubble and squeak worth eating.
- Keeping the beef hotTwo plates over boiling water is a bain-marie. A low oven at 200F does the same job without drying the slices.
- The optional additionsCold mashed potato is a common modern addition and helps bind the mixture. Add it with the cabbage; a splash of vinegar at the end cuts the fat.
- A stray lineThe "1 lb. liver" at the end belongs to the next recipe in the book, not to this one.
The name is often said to be onomatopoeic: the bubbling of the boiled meat and the squeak of cabbage hitting hot fat, though this derivation is folk tradition rather than documented etymology. The rhyming couplet quoted here comes from the early nineteenth-century verse tradition that grew up around the dish, and "Dr. Kitchener" is Dr William Kitchiner, who held an MD but did not practise, and whose Cook's Oracle (1817) was among the English cookbooks addressed to middle-class households rather than professional kitchens; on at least the occasion this recipe records, he set a culinary joke to music. "George Augusta Sala" is George Augustus Sala, the Victorian journalist who wrote The Thorough Good Cook late in life. In its original form the dish is leftovers management — a Sunday joint of salt beef and its accompanying cabbage, revived on Monday — and the potato-heavy version most people in Britain now recognise came later, as potatoes displaced beef on the poorer table.