Frying leftover mashed potatoes

For the cartoon, see Bubble and Squeek. Bubble and squeak is a British dish made from cooked potatoes and cabbage, mixed together and fried. The dish as it is made in modern times frying leftover mashed potatoes considerably from its first recorded versions, in which cooked beef was the main ingredient and potatoes did not feature. The earliest-known recipe is in Mrs Rundell’s A New System of Domestic Cookery, published in 1806.

It consists wholly of cabbage and rare roast beef, seasoned and fried. The Beef, so surly, quarrels with the Cabbage. An 1848 recipe from the US is similar, but adds chopped carrots. In 1872 a Lancashire newspaper offered a recipe for “delicious bubble and squeak”, consisting of thinly-sliced beef fried with cabbage and carrot, but not potatoes, although by then they had been a major crop in Lancashire for decades. In the 1880s potatoes began to appear in recipes.

Cut about three-quarters of a pound of cold, boiled beef into neat, thin slices. Fry slightly over a slow fire six minutes. Put the vegetables round the dish and the meat in the centre. Potatoes featured in a recipe printed in a Yorkshire paper in 1892 but, as in earlier versions, the main ingredients were beef and cabbage.

Smith and Dickson Wright, stipulates no ingredients other than potato and cabbage, but there are many published variants of the basic recipe. Gary Rhodes favours sliced brussels sprouts, rather than cabbage, with gently cooked sliced onions and mashed potato, fried in butter. The mixture is then shallow fried, either shaped into round cakes or as a single panful, tortilla-style, and then sliced. Dickson Wright, Oliver and Jeff Smith favour the whole-pan method. 1969 recipe adds peas and pumpkin to the basic mix.

American recipe from 1913 resembles Rundell’s version, with the addition of a border of mashed potato. The OED gives a secondary definition of “bubble and squeak”: “figurative and in figurative contexts. Something resembling or suggestive of bubble and squeak, especially in consisting of a variety of elements”. In 1825 a reviewer in The Morning Post dismissed a new opera at Covent Garden as “a sort of bubble and squeak mixture of English and Italian”.

Subscription or participating institution membership required. To the Printer of the Public Advertiser”, The Public Advertiser, 9 February 1764, p. Present Week”, The Diary, or Woodfall’s Register, 28 February 1791, p. Australian Meat”, Blackburn Standard, 20 March 1872, p. The Household Column”, The Manchester Times, 11 March 1882, p. Hearth and Home: Bubble and Squeak”, York Herald, 28 May 1892, p. Christmas bubble and squeak” Archived 15 August 2020 at the Wayback Machine, BBC.

New Ideas for Bubble ‘N Squeak”, The Sydney Morning Herald, 26 May 1969, p. Hearty Luncheon and Supper Dishes”, The Reading Eagle, 20 July 1913. Here and There”, Times Colonist, 24 December 1959, p. Out and About”, The Province, 24 November 1995, p.