Flicking the Vs: July 2012

When I wrote about having a vegan full English breakfast at Inspiral cafe last week, I rhapsodised about the bubble and squeak that came with it.

One of the lovely commenters who read the post - Allysia, who writes the excellent The Real Meal - said she was unfamiliar with bubble and squeak. That was all the encouragement I needed to cook some up!

For the uninitiated, bubble and squeak is a British dish that's centuries old. It was apparently invented as a way to use up the leftover bits of your Sunday lunch: roast potatoes, Brussel sprouts, parsnips, carrots, whatever you've got left, you just fry it up and that's bubble and squeak.

Pretty much anything can go into bubble and squeak, and the recipe normally goes something like this: heat a bit of oil in a pan, fry til hot, eat.

There's also a second school of thought that uses mashed potatoes and makes bubble and squeak patties (they most often seen in full English breakfasts in greasy spoons) - and that's what I thought I'd make. With no roast leftovers to hand, this is a recipe for making bubble and squeak from scratch.

Bubble and squeak

Makes six patties

Ingredients

Mashed potatoes from two large baking potatoes

One medium white onion, finely chopped

A quarter of a small white cabbage, finely sliced

Flour

Salt and white pepper

How you do it

Fry the onion in oil or margarine (be generous with the fat!) until soft, then add the cabbage and fry til that's soft.

Add the mashed potatoes to the other veggies, add salt and white pepper (and a slug of vegan

Worcestershire sauce if you fancy) and shape into patties.

Dust the patties lightly with flour.

You can now either bake or shallow fry the patties. If you're shallow frying, cook on one side til brown then flip over (be gentle with them, they're liable to fall apart); if you're baking, heat your oven to 220C and grease a baking sheet liberally with vegan margarine. Put the patties on, cook for five to ten minutes, until the bottom is brown, and then flip and cook for five to ten minutes more.

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London's Borough Market is where those locals and tourists overly interested in their stomachs and overly careless about the fullness of their wallets go to stock up on foodie goodies.

It's not a million miles away from where I work, so I thought I'd put on my best vegan explorer hat and check out the animal free options.

First up and worth a mention is Turnips. It's a a huge - and I mean huge paint-an-H-there-and-you-could-land-a-helicopter huge - greengrocers, rammed to the gunnels with fruit and veg you'll be familiar with, and some you might not be. Galangal? Bull's heart tomatoes? Salisfy? Check. Feeling flush? Go the mushroom section and try not to wince when you see how much a handful or two will set you back.

Another honorable mention goes to The Turkish Deli, for their Turkish delight and - yes, you've guessed it - Turkish coffee. They make no bones about the vegan-ness of most of their Turkish delight (a couple of flavours have honey in, but most don't), and proudly announce it's gelatine-free. What's more, it's got the perfect level of squidge, comes in all manner of quirky flavours including the far-tastier-than-it-sounds pine sap. You can get a cube of Turkish delight with a cup of the rocket fuelled coffee, and still only need a couple of coins for the privilege. Bargain.

(For the sweet of tooth, there's also chocolate shop The Rabot Estate, which does some top-end dark chocolate that also happens to be animal-free. They do their own stuff and also stock Hotel Chocolat lines too.)

A tentative mention for the Arabica Food & Spice Company - on a cursory run-past, it looked like they stocked quite a few vegan-friendly bits and bats (think mezze staples like falafel and hummus) in amongst their omnivorous offerings, but I didn't have time to quiz them on the ingredients to confirm if that's the case. If anyone knows, pass on the details and I'll update this post.

Borough Market does have its own veggie stall in the shape of The Veggie Table. You've got two basic choices here - the non-vegan Heavenly Haloumi burger or the very vegan Organic Superveg burger. Either can be had in a box with a choice of salads or in a bun, with a choice of sauces (salsa, red onion, or hummus).

If you couldn't guess which one I went for, you're reading the wrong blog.

The burger itself is made from organic vegetables, quinoa, nuts, sultanas and cumin and, along with the sauce of your choice, comes with that sort of spiky coleslaw annoyance that serves more to perforate you repeatedly in the side of your cheek than add anything meaningful in the way of flavour.

As you might spot already, I didn't love the burger. I wanted to - dammit, it was the only thing parading its veganness in the whole bloody market. But I couldn't. Why? The wetness.

The burger was just too soggy. It tasted of not much bar the overliberal application of cumin and the underliberal application of anything that could offer a meaningful foil to the cumin, and it was sodden in a way anything not first dropped in a puddle shouldn't be.

I opted for salsa as my sauce of choice, which probably didn't help at all, given it was fairly wet to start with. Wet burger + wet sauce = lunch wetter than an otter's pocket.

The bun was nice though and the salads on offer - one potato, one beetroot and grain - looked more promising. Alas, I couldn't tell you if they lived up to that promise - a burger and some salad would have set me back £7 and I didn't have enough cash in my pocket to enable the investment.

Had I have had £7 in my back burner, I could have bought a metric truckload of Turkish delight with it. And that, dear friends, would have been a far sounder use of my seven nuggets.

Borough Market
http://www.boroughmarket.org.uk/
8 Southwark Street
London
SE1 1TL
0207 407 1002

borough market