Skip to main content
Main

Bubble and Squeak

A fried dish of boiled cabbage and sliced salt beef, seasoned with salt and soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Beef and cabbage work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 872 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Bubble and Squeak

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cabbage

  1. Wash the cabbage well in salt and water.

  2. Boil a saucepan of water, add salt and soda. When boiling, add the cabbage and cook for about 20 minutes until tender.

  3. Drain the cabbage and set aside.

Cook the meat

  1. Slice the cold salt beef and fat, and place in a frying pan.

  2. Fry the meat over medium heat until light brown, turning occasionally.

  3. Arrange the meat in the center of a warm dish and cover to keep warm.

Fry and serve

  1. Chop the boiled cabbage into small pieces.

  2. Fry the chopped cabbage in the same pan for a few minutes, stirring to prevent burning.

  3. For serving, place the fried cabbage and any warmed carrots or parsnips around the meat in the center.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Beef + cabbagetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together872 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cabbage
Forms the bulk of the dish and, once fried, gives browned, slightly sweet flavour.
Salt beef or pork
Provides the savoury, fatty meat that browns in the pan and flavours the dish.
Common soda
Softens the cabbage during boiling, helping it cook to tenderness.

The step that matters

Frying the chopped cabbage. Cabbage can scorch before it browns if the heat is too high or it is left unstirred. Stirring spreads heat evenly and lets the surface caramelise into golden flavour without burning.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipesBeef BrothBeef Broth67 recipes