Labskaus: Hamburg's pink sailors' hash, and why it looks like that

Overview

Labskaus arrives looking like nothing else you will be served this trip: a smooth bright-pink or purple mash, the colour of beetroot juice, mounded on a plate under a fried egg with pickles and a piece of herring on the side. The look is the first hurdle and the whole reputation. Underneath the colour it is simple, savoury comfort food — salt-cured beef minced fine and hashed together with potato, onion and beetroot into a soft, warm purée. The pink is the beetroot cooked through the whole thing, not a garnish, and that is exactly why the plate is the colour it is.

It is a regional dish, not this city’s alone. Labskaus belongs to the maritime north as a whole — you find it in Bremen, in Lübeck, along the Baltic and North Sea coasts, and in close cousins across the water: the Norwegian and Scandinavian lapskaus, and the English lobscouse that gave Liverpool the word scouse for its own sailors’ stew and for its people. Hamburg is simply the great German port where the dish is most at home and most reliably found on an old-fashioned menu.

The origin is genuinely a sailor’s story, and this part is not folklore: it is food built for long voyages before refrigeration. Everything in it keeps — salt beef, pickled beetroot, onions, ship’s biscuit or potato — and everything is soft, which mattered on a ship where fresh food ran out, scurvy loosened teeth, and a rolling deck made anything that needed cutting a nuisance. A hash you can eat with a spoon in a swell is a design, not an accident. What is not settled is the name. It is usually traced to the English lobscouse, but the older root behind that word is genuinely uncertain, and anyone who tells you exactly where “Labskaus” comes from is guessing with confidence.

What to order

You order Labskaus by name and then, if the menu offers it, by its accompaniments. The mash is the constant; what comes with it is the variable, and the words are worth knowing:

• Spiegelei — a fried egg, laid on top. Standard, and you break the yolk into the hash.
• Rollmops — a fillet of pickled herring rolled around onion or gherkin and pinned with a stick. The classic partner on the rim of the plate.
• Matjes — the milder young salt-cured herring, offered instead of Rollmops in some places.
• Bismarckhering — a sharper vinegar-marinated herring, another herring option.
• Rote Bete — extra pickled beetroot on the side, and pickled gherkins, which cut the richness. These two are the traditional garnish and the reason the plate is not as heavy as it sounds.

The one real choice worth understanding is whether the beetroot is mixed through the hash or served on the side for you to fold in yourself. Both are legitimate and traditional houses do it both ways; the side-served version simply lets you control the colour and the sharpness. It is not a sign of a lesser kitchen — do not read a separated beetroot as a compromise.

Eat it as it is built: yolk broken into the warm mash, a forkful of herring and gherkin alongside for the sour-salt contrast. The whole plate is a balance of soft-rich and sharp-pickled, and it only works if you eat across it rather than picking the parts apart.

What to avoid

The thing most likely to put you off Labskaus is not a bad restaurant but a tin. It is sold jarred and canned in every supermarket here, and the shelf-stable version — greyer, saltier, gluier — is what many people have tried and disliked. A plate made fresh in a traditional kitchen is a different dish; judging Labskaus by the tin is like judging bread by a packet of crumbs.

On a menu, the warning sign is the reheated, claggy version: a dense, cooling, uniform paste with no distinct potato and barely any beef, served lukewarm. Freshly made, it is soft and warm and you can still tell the beef from the potato; left standing and microwaved, it sets into wallpaper paste.

Be a little wary, too, of the “gourmet” reinterpretation — the components arranged separately as an artful, expensive tasting plate, the beef seared as a steak, a quail’s egg perched on a smear. That is a chef making a point, and it can be good, but it is no longer the rough sailors’ hash and it is usually priced as if the reinvention were an improvement. If you came for the real thing, the plainest old German tavern serving it is closer to the point than the restaurant treating it as a curiosity.

Practicalities

Labskaus is a sit-down plate, not a stall snack, so it costs like a hot main course: roughly €10 to €16 in a traditional tavern, herring and all. A version costing noticeably more is usually the reinvented one described above rather than a better bowl of the original.

It is hearty, warming winter food by nature — a dish for a grey, cold day rather than a hot one — though old-style taverns keep it on the menu the year round. It reads as lunch or an early, substantial dinner more than a late one, and it is exactly the kind of dish the traditional, unfashionable German restaurant does best and the trend-driven place does not bother with at all. Look for it where the menu is short and old-fashioned, not where it is a single ironic entry among burgers.

Because it is a proper restaurant dish rather than a market-stall one, the city guide’s cash-only warning barely applies here: a sit-down tavern will almost always take a card, though as everywhere in this country it does no harm to have notes on you.

And come to it hungry and curious rather than cautious. The colour is the only difficult thing about Labskaus, and it stops mattering at the first spoonful.