Mix and freeze: While your leftovers are still warm, chop the larger cooked vegetables and fold them into the mashed potato, adding any other tasty bits and pieces you've got in the fridge (meat, fish, etc).You have a little cold fish? Fold it in! Green peas and roasted parsnips? Perfect! Even cold Brussels sprouts can sit happily in the mix. It's an equal opportunities dish: Only got some cold mashed potato and cabbage? No problem.In fact, bubble & squeak, so named for the lovely noises it makes while cooking, isn't a purely British phenomenon – it has culinary relatives around the world, such as bauernfrühstück (Germany), stovies (Scotland), roupa velha (Portugal), hash (USA) and biksemad (Denmark)!

Yes, we're talking leftovers – primarily mashed potatoes, greens and other vegetables – all mushed together and shallow fried to crisp perfection, but when a dish is this tasty, there's no room for gastronomic snobbery.

What’s with all these dialectical English food names, eh? Whether it’s spotted dick or scotch eggs, we go for the quirky titles.First mentioned in an 1806 recipe book by Maria Rundell, the classic British dish known as bubble & squeak is a thrifty and hugely tasty classic that's a real Christmas must-have, especially served as a Boxing Day breakfast with a lovely runny organic egg and some toast soliders! You can get ready-made versions, of course, but this is a comfort food you really should rustle up yourself, like. These days, folks often cobble together the dish from leftover Sunday roast recipes. But bubble and squeak is perfectly fine by itself, thank you very much. Traditionally, English folks serve some sort of meat with the food. That was in A New System of Domestic Cookery. Maria Eliza Rundell (1745-1828) documented the recipe in writing for the first time in 1806. Its name derives from the squeaking noise the cabbage makes as it fries.

It’s a breakfast dish that consists of cabbage and mashed potatoes. It’s a type of mashed potato, but a squeakier version. Continuing on our look at quirky British comfort foods, here’s this one.

Download to make bubble and squeak