Bubble & squeak: A mouth-watering dish that deserves a comeback

I GREW up in a typical Yorkshire home in the 60s and 70s, where every Sunday we would sit down as a family to eat our Sunday dinner – which would centre around a big joint of beef with lots of Yorkshire puddings, cabbage, roast potatoes, mashed carrots and swede and lashings of good gravy. We also had a plate with many slices of white bread to mop-up the leftover gravy on our plates.

While the Sunday dinner was clearly the main event of the week, my memories of this long-standing tradition are of the following day’s teatime when mum would prepare a fry-up. It was after school on a Monday that I looked forward to the most, not that I hated school. It was the Monday night fry-up as mum would call it, but the commonly accepted name was always bubble and squeak.

All the leftover vegetables from the Sunday dinner were piled into a big frying pan and cooked long enough to get the bottom a bit brown and crispy with the potatoes holding the other vegetables together like glue, making it like a vegetable patty and not the other fry-up version of bacon, sausages, eggs, baked beans, tomatoes, mushrooms, etc.

The origins of the name are unclear, and the ingredients of this forgotten dish can vary a lot, thinking about it we sure have some strange-sounding names for meals in England – spotted dick, toad-in-the-hole, shepherd’s pie and not forgetting our very own Yorkshire puddings. Today I’m disappointed with the dish as it never seems to live-up to my nostalgia-driven expectations of mum’s bubble and squeak. However, our modern versions use non-stick frying pans, a luxury unknown back in the swinging sixties. As a child, it was always crunchy, not quite burnt, but golden flakes of potato that had to be physically scraped off the bottom of an old black cast-iron frying pan that sure did give the dish its character – without them it was bubble, but sadly deficient in squeak.

This wartime, ration book, mouth-watering dish from yesteryear surely deserves a comeback. Bubble and squeak is not for the ‘moaning Minnies’. It’s a reet Yorkshire dish with or without the Brussels sprouts and should always have an egg-tra twist of a fried egg on top to stop them narky folk complaining.

RECIPE

BUBBLE AND SQUEAK

Serves 4 good portions

Ingredients:

450g/1lb mashed potatoes, seasoned with a shake of ground black pepper and salt or maybe a teaspoon of warming mustard powder

450g/1lb any mixed cooked vegetables, such as cabbage, swede, carrots, peas and Brussels sprouts

85g/3oz butter, vegetable oil or lard

1 large onion, finely chopped

Optional extras can be added like bacon bits or ham pieces and any Sunday roast meats added with the vegetables

Method:

1. In a large frying pan, gently melt the butter.

2. Add the onion and fry till translucent and lightly brown in colour for 3 minutes.

3. Turn-up the heat setting and add the mashed potatoes and mixed vegetables.

4. Fry for around 10 minutes in the melted butter and onions, turning the mixture continuously with a spatula, aiming to brown and not burn the outside edges – be brave and continue stirring and scraping the crusty bits from the sides of the frying pan.

5. When the mixture is fully heated through with lots of crusty bits, give the vegetables one final push down on the base of the frying pan.

6. Serve at once with a fried egg on top and a shake of freshly-ground black pepper.