Labskaus: Hamburg's Sailor Hash With Beetroot and Beef

Labskaus looks like a joke and eats like a serious dinner. It arrives at the table bright, alarming pink, with a fried egg sitting on it and a rolled-up herring beside it, and every photograph of it on the internet has been taken by somebody who thinks they are documenting an oddity. Then you eat it, and it is salty, sharp, savoury and faintly sweet all at once, and you understand why Hamburg has never let it go.

The pink is beetroot. The salt is the beef. The sharpness is the pickle jar, poured in with a hand that feels reckless and is not. And the whole thing is a nineteenth-century ship’s galley solution to a set of problems that no longer exist, preserved intact because it happens to taste good.

Everything on a ship, and nothing else

Consider what a Baltic or North Sea sailing vessel had aboard in 1850 after three weeks at sea. Salt beef in barrels. Potatoes, which kept reasonably well. Onions, which kept better. Pickled beetroot and pickled cucumbers in vinegar. Pickled herring. Ship’s biscuit. That is very close to the complete list.

Now consider the crew. Long voyages produced men with scurvy and men with no teeth, which are the same problem viewed from either end — vitamin C deficiency destroys the gums and the teeth follow. A dish that requires no chewing was a practical necessity aboard ship, and Labskaus is a dish you could eat with a spoon and no molars at all.

So: take the entire larder, boil it, mash it together, and serve it. The result is soft, it is calorie-dense, it uses only things that survive months at sea, and the beetroot and the pickles carry enough vitamin C to be doing something useful about the scurvy, entirely by accident.

The word travelled further than the dish. English lobscouse is the same thing, and Liverpool’s version of it — scouse, still a stew rather than a mash — gave the city’s inhabitants their nickname. Norway has lapskaus and Sweden has lapskojs. The etymology is genuinely unsettled: candidates include Latvian labs kauss (good bowl), a Norwegian word for a rough hash, and the notion that it began as a sailor’s insult. Nobody knows, and every port city on the North Sea claims it.

Norwegian lapskaus is the closest surviving relative and shows what happened when the dish went ashore: it stayed chunky, it dropped the beetroot, and it became a stew. Hamburg’s version stayed mashed, because Hamburg’s version stayed on the boat longer.

How a ship’s dish took a city hostage

Labskaus went ashore in Hamburg for a simple reason: the sailors did. A port that big generates an enormous shoreside population of men who spent half their lives at sea and who wanted, on land, the food they had eaten afloat — partly from habit and mostly because it was cheap. Harbour taverns served it, dockworkers ate it, and by the early twentieth century it had crossed from sailors’ food into Hamburg food, which is a promotion most maritime dishes never manage.

It then survived the twentieth century by being useful. Labskaus is built from tinned meat, root vegetables and pickles, which made it precisely the dish you could still cook in 1946 in a city that had been flattened. Rationing suited it. So did the fact that it needs no oven, and Hamburg in the years after the firestorm had a shortage of ovens.

Today it occupies an odd position. It is on the menu at the old Gaststätten around the harbour and at the tourist-facing places on the Landungsbrücken, and it is on the table at home rather less than either group pretends. Hamburgers are proud of it in the way people are proud of a relative who was in a war. The city has a Labskaus festival. There are arguments in the local press about whether the beetroot belongs. It is fully load-bearing civic identity now, several generations after the last crew that needed it came ashore.

The one thing everyone agrees on is the plate around it, which is the part that has changed least in a hundred and fifty years, and which is the part visitors get most wrong.

The salt beef question

Hamburg households and the city’s traditional restaurants use Pökelfleisch — brined, cured beef, sold cooked. Outside Germany the honest equivalents are cooked salt beef from a Jewish deli, a boiled joint of home-brined brisket, or tinned corned beef.

Tinned corned beef deserves a defence, because people flinch at it. It is salt-cured beef that has been cooked in the tin, and it is precisely, historically, what belongs in this dish — Labskaus and canned meat grew up together in the second half of the nineteenth century, and Hamburg’s own recipes have used the tin since it existed. It shreds into the mash better than anything else because it is already at the point of collapse. Buy a decent one, chill the tin first so it turns out in a block, and chop it rather than crumbling it to dust.

If you brine your own brisket — 5 days in a 6% salt brine with juniper and bay, then simmered three hours — the result is considerably better and the dish becomes a two-day project. Salt beef trimmings from the deli counter are the sensible middle.

What you must avoid is fresh beef. Labskaus without cure tastes like beef mashed potato, which is a fine thing and a different thing. The cure is what gives it the deep, faintly funky salinity that the vinegar plays against.

The pink, and the sweetness trap

Two hundred and fifty grams of beetroot in 800 g of potato is enough to turn the entire dish the colour of a salmon, and Hamburg makes no apology for it. Some Bremen and Flensburg versions use less and end up faintly blush; some use more and go magenta.

Buy plain cooked beetroot, or the kind pickled in a savoury vinegar. Avoid anything sold in sweet vinegar or, worse, sweetened brine — Labskaus has a sweetness problem waiting to happen, because beetroot is 8% sugar and potato is starch, and once it tips sweet the dish is finished. The gherkin liquid is what holds the line.

That is the load-bearing bit of this recipe, so it is worth saying plainly: 100 ml of gherkin brine is the correct amount and it will feel wrong. Pour it in anyway. Pickle brine here is doing what stock does in a risotto — carrying salt, acid and aromatics (dill, mustard seed, coriander) into the starch as it absorbs. It is the difference between a pink mash and Labskaus. The same trick lifts a heavy Rindsrouladen gravy, and German cooking uses the pickle jar as a seasoning far more than its reputation suggests.

Texture, and the mistake everyone makes

Do not use a food processor. Do not use a ricer. Do not chase smoothness.

Potato starch granules are fragile bags, and when you overwork boiled potato the bags rupture and release long chains of amylopectin that immediately go gluey. Thirty seconds in a food processor produces something with the texture of wallpaper paste, and there is no recovery. This is the same physics that ruins mashed potato everywhere, and Labskaus is more vulnerable to it because the mixture then gets fried and folded for another five minutes.

Mash coarsely with a hand masher, leave visible lumps, and let the folding in the pan finish the job. The target is a mixture that holds a spoon-track and still has bits of potato and beef you can identify. It should look rough.

Floury potatoes only. Waxy ones will refuse to break down and you will end up over-mashing to compensate, which lands you back in the glue.

Let the potatoes steam dry in the colander for five minutes. Wet potato dilutes everything and you have already got 350 ml of liquid going into this pan.

The plate around it

Fried egg, rollmops, gherkin, and — in Hamburg — a slice of pickled herring and sometimes a spoonful of beetroot on the side. Every one of them earns its place. The runny yolk breaks over the top and enriches it. The rollmop’s vinegar sharpness cuts. The gherkin is the crunch, which is the one thing the mash has none of.

Ordering Labskaus in a Hamburg Gaststätte gets you all of it without asking, and locals will tell you, correctly, that eating it without the egg is missing the point. If pickled herring is a step too far, inlagd sill is the gentler Swedish version and does the same job.

What goes wrong

It went sweet. Sweet-pickled beetroot, or not enough gherkin brine, or both. Add brine a tablespoon at a time and a squeeze of lemon; there is no other fix.

It is glue. Overworked potato. Nothing recovers this. Start again with a hand masher.

It is dry and claggy on the plate. Not enough liquid, or it sat too long before serving. Labskaus stiffens noticeably as it cools; loosen with hot stock right before it goes out.

It tastes flat despite everything. The beef was not properly cured, or the onions were undercooked. Ten minutes on the onions, and let some of the beef catch and brown on the base of the pan — those brown scraps are the only roast flavour in a dish that is otherwise entirely boiled and pickled.

It is grey rather than pink. Not enough beetroot, or beetroot added too late to bleed. It should go in with five minutes of pan time ahead of it.

Storage and variations

Labskaus keeps 3 days in the fridge and is at its best fried the next day: press it into a hot pan with dripping, leave it alone for six minutes until a crust forms underneath, and turn it in pieces. This is arguably better than the original and no Hamburger will admit it. It freezes for 2 months and comes back slightly wetter.

The Bremen version leaves out the beetroot entirely, producing a pale, less interesting dish that Bremen defends vigorously. Danish and Schleswig-Holstein versions sometimes fold in a matjes herring, which pushes the whole thing further out to sea. A vegetarian Labskaus with smoked tofu is a thing that exists in Hamburg’s student kitchens and it is better than it sounds, provided the pickle brine stays at full strength.

Add the salt last, and taste before you do. Between the corned beef, the gherkin brine and the stock you may need none at all.