Bubble & Yuk

There are vegetables I merely dislike, and then there are vegetables I actively distrust. Mashed potato sits firmly in the latter category. It is potato that has surrendered. All texture gone, all ambition crushed, reduced to a beige paste whose chief virtue is that it fills space. Sprouts are worse. Little sulphurous cabbages that smell faintly of punishment and taste like regret, unless drowned in bacon bits as an act of culinary mercy.

Hay, however, operates on an optimistic theory of cookery. She believes that if you take two things someone loathes, fry them together, and give the result a jaunty British name, they will somehow emerge reborn. Bubble and squeak, she reasoned, would alchemise failure into triumph. A sort of vegetable Witness Protection Scheme.

This is magical thinking. If you dislike sprouts, frying them does not make them charming. It makes them louder. If you dislike mashed potato, compressing it into a greasy slab does not restore its dignity. It merely allows it to absorb oil while remaining fundamentally apologetic. Combining the two does not cancel their flaws. It compounds them. One plus one still equals two, even in a frying pan.

Bubble and squeak has form. It is nostalgia food, invented to use up leftovers and justify them with patriotism. It relies heavily on the belief that anything served with a crisp edge and a browned underside must be good. This is untrue. Burnt disappointment is still disappointment, just with better PR.

I ate it, of course. I am not a monster. But let the record show that culinary transformation is not achieved by shouting “fried” and hoping for the best. Some things are irredeemable. Mashed potato remains potato’s lowest calling. Sprouts remain small green liars. Frying them together does not produce joy. It produces a double disappointment, now lightly crispy.

However, I did rescue the situation by drenching them in Lingham's chilli sauce, which helped to disguise the disgusting flavour.