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 differs considerably from delia smith christmas book recipes 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.