My parents were telling my kids about a cruise they had taken. They mentioned that they had eaten something called “bubble and squeak.” Since it was an English ship, perhaps this is some type of British food? Any ideas?
Why, yes, it is a British recipe – a traditional way of using up left-over cabbage and potato, originally. These days it’s often tarted up a bit.
Here’s a recipe:
Bubble ‘n’ Squeak
Makes 6 servings.
1/2 medium head cabbage, sliced
3 slices bacon, diced
1 onion, thinly sliced
1 cup cubed cooked ham
1 tablespoon butter
3 cups potatoes - baked, cooled
and thinly sliced
1/2 teaspoon paprika
salt and pepper to taste
In a medium saucepan, cook cabbage in a small amount of water for about
5 minutes, or until tender. Drain, and set aside.
In a well-seasoned cast iron skillet, cook bacon and onion until onion
is soft and bacon is cooked. Add ham, and cook until heated through. Add
butter, then mix in the cooked cabbage and potatoes. Season with paprika,
salt, and pepper. Cook until browned on bottom, turn, and brown again.
A quick google search of “bubble and squeak” will answer your questions.
It’s fried mashed potato and cabbage. Of corse all us Brit dopers knew of this delicacy knew this already 
(or should that be our barf smiley?)
“Bubble and squeak” is Cockney rhyming slang – one of my personal favorite utterly-unknown subsets of colloquial English. It’s much more colorful than, for example, modern American urban slang, which seems to consist mostly of devising new words for weapons, intoxicants and sexual organs and activities, and inserting “-izz-” into words to make them one syllable longer. (Someone – one very brilliant person – must have invented that.)
Cockney rhyming slang is more of a code than a set of informal terms for things. Essentially, terms are matched to short, colorful phrases by a rhyming word: for example, “ball of chalk” = “walk”. Often, the idea is further encoded by using only the non-rhyming part of the phrase; you could say you were going for a ball, or hide the meaning of a dirty phrase by calling someone a “bottle” = “bottle and glass” = “arse”.
So “bubble and squeak” = “speak”, or “beak”, or “Greek”, depending on the source. I’d imagine that the food called “bubble and squeak” comes from “Greek”. It seems to consist (according to a web search) of fried leftover greens or cabbage and potatoes.
I’m not sure if Cockney rhyming slang is still actually used much, aside from maybe a few terms, but there are several dictionaries easily available on the Web. I got my own introduction to it from a dictionary in an old Reader’s Digest encyclopedia that was both very British and very 60’s.
it’s basically fried left-overs of cabbage & potato …
slang for what??
I was always told it was called “bubble and squeak” in honour of its aftereffects.
Delicious tho’.
Julie
It should be pointed out that the slang came from the dish, not the other way round. And the dish is so named because of the noises it makes when cooking.
I have heard “bubble and squeak” used to indicate “Greek”, but only the once, and that was a good 17 or 18 years ago.
In rhyming slang these days, the word “bubble” means “laugh” (as in “bubble bath” said in a London accent).
You’re ‘avin’ a bubble, intcha?