Hamburger Labskaus

My favorite variant, from an English dialect: Lob’s Course | Food for Boors
Other sources believe the name comes from a Norwegian term for: Easy to chew
From Lithuanian comes: Labas kaušas | Good bowl
And finally, in Low German we find Lappen – belly flap piece of beef – and Kaus | Bowl.

Cuddle

There is also confusion about the ingredients. There seems to be agreement essentially only on the basics …

• Cured beef
• Beetroot
• Gherkins
• Potatoes – are used at least the majority, but just not everywhere …

… as well as how to deal with it:
Off into the meat grinder!

Because the consistency is beyond reproach. Uh, well almost …
Labskaus is a porridge.

The addition of potatoes is – especially in the German area – of course a must.

And then it already becomes colorful:
Fish in? Or to this?
Which fish?
Onions in? Or to this?
Cured beef – not basic after all – but corned beef?
Maybe ground beef?
Or pig? Lamb? Reindeer …?
But not porridge – but soup? Or a stew?
A spread?

As you can see, it’s complicated.
The Danish Gammel Danske Kaus – also a terrific name, I think – likes to substitute pork for beef, for example.
But the Danes don’t put it through a meat grinder, instead they dice the meat and serve it on slices of mixed bread. Seems to me more along the lines of Smørrebrød (A top notch idea for a variant).

Norwegian lapskaus, on the other hand, also contains turnips and root vegetables – the tendency there is more toward a kind of potato soup.
It is also to use whale meat 😳 or optionally reindeer meat instead of beef as an ingredient.

In Britain’s Scouse – a Liverpool variant – Labskaus is understood to be more of a stew, sort of like Irish Stew.
Here, in addition to potatoes, they use pearl barley and root vegetables, in which beef or lamb on the bone are slowly cooked.

One thing seems certain:
Labskaus is a seafaring dish.
They used ingredients that were easy to store on a ship and easy to prepare.
The obligatory fried egg was available – the sailors always had chickens with them on board.
However, I do not believe in fish as a side dish // herring, pickled, salted, filleted, rolled / maties / stockfish / … //. At least, I don’t think it was particularly sought after by sailors at the time because of its ubiquity.

Sailor’s Yarn

Here in Hamburg, I’ve been told time and again that Labskaus is a kind of “weekly overview”.
That is, the ship’s cook simply dumped the week’s leftovers into a big pot and boiled it all down to a thick porridge. This does not create a good image … and is not true.

I do not want to claim that a ship’s cook, possibly at the behest of his skipper, did not proceed in the same way in order to satisfy the bear’s hunger of the sailors at low cost. But that had nothing to do with Labskaus.

Scurvy

There was a great shortage of vitamin C on the high seas.
This deficiency inevitably led to scurvy. And very quickly. This lasts only 2-4 months.
Scurvy leads to tooth loss in addition to exhaustion and depression.

Pickled cucumbers and beet contain vitamin C.
They were also easy to store in barrels on ships on long voyages and, like cured beef, kept for a long time.
In this way, the labskaus became, so to speak, a medicine.

And – let’s come back to consistency for a moment:
Whether porridge or soup, both forms can be easily consumed by toothless sea bears …

Hamburger Labskaus

We are thankfully not plagued by such worries and cook labskaus because we like it so much.
Our variant is, of course, the Hamburg Labskaus.
With Bismarck herring. About which there would also be so much to tell … but this kitchen know-it-all is already quite long, and thus that is another story, which should be told another time …

Kitchen sounds

If you want to get into the right groove while cooking – here’s the soundtrack to match.
Pack, people !!! Another great Hamburg specialty …