Talk:Scouse (food)

Derivation

The entry gave the derivation of scouse from the Norwegian labskaus. The Norwegian and German pages however, derive labskaus from the English word lobscouse, supported by Duden. I updated the entry.Cavort (talk) 10:47, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

Fish based, Roberts reference & the derivation of Labscouse

fish...

Having searching carefully I was not able to find any reference to validate Esasus' edit saying that scouse is a fish based dish, so I refactored to remove that.

You will see references on the web to German Labskaus being a Herring dish, but all the pictures available on Google images seem to confirm that it is indeed a beef (and or pork) hash, served with one or two rollmops (which are made from herring), pickle and sometimes fried egg added on top.

The Norwegian connection...

Esasus cited Chris Roberts, Heavy Words Lightly Thrown: The Reason Behind Rhyme, Thorndike Press,2006 (ISBN 0-7862-8517-6) as reference when he modified the page.

I found this at http://books.google.com/books?id=MdMZqhMzfpYC but I don't know if this online copy is authorized or illegally published.

On page 112 the referenced source reads:

Even 'Scouse' (and the attendant dish) comes from the north European sailors' food, lobskaus, which was brought to Liverpool by foreign mariners.

The Amazon page for the book http://www.amazon.com/Heavy-Words-Lightly-Thrown-Reason/dp/1592401309 has this review:

From Publishers Weekly ... A librarian by night and a London tour guide by day, Roberts deploys an informal style of scholarship to dazzling effect, transforming a catalogue of familiar nursery rhymes into a treasure trove of tantalizingly slippery archaisms, hidden etymological layers, arcane associations and buried meanings. ... In a fluidly digressive style, he debunks accepted theories and confidently asserts his own. ...

Unless has Roberts' book has good references it can cite itself to the origin of the word, it's probably not a good source to be taken as an authority on the origin of the word, so I took that out too.

The page for Labskaus seems to have more detailed information on the derivation whether it is correct or not I don't know. If it can be validated, perhaps this should be copied or moved to this (English Labscouse) page where it is directly relevant.

Searching on Google the origin of 'Labscouse, Lapscouse, Lapskaus, Lobskaus, Lobskaus seems to turn up a strong folk perception of a conflicting direction for the English <=> Norwegian influence.

We're so used to terms in English having come from other languages so much that perhaps we don't expect to find words that came about the other way around, or maybe they're actually right and the fewer sources saying English => Norwegian are wrong.

I found many good links, but this probably isn't the right place for them.

JohnGH (talk) 19:50, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

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Broken link

The link to the recipe on Merseyside Today is dead and I can't find it so I have replaced it with a recipe on the BBC website. Tony Corsini (talk) 08:39, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

Circular Argument developing ? - Norwegian -> English -> German -> ?

This is merely a comment. I have not researched the facts or for that matter read the article and its discussion too closely.

My initial thought is that maybe there is a circular argument developing. Scouse has an origin as none English term becoming common in English usage in Liverpool area. Initially from term similar to lobscouse possibly Norwegian. German term http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labskaus then comes from the English term.

Which term came first and in what order does anyone know ? Would a German term be more likely to come from English than Norwegian, or indeed maybe come from somewhere else, or even be the origin of the Norwegian term.

As I said this is a question/comment. My only interest is that I currently reside in an area close to Liverpool, and so have an interest in reading about local matters. I am not trying to dispute or challenge any facts or statements. JohnH99 (talk) 19:30, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Tidying up

The present article lacks citations at numerous points and such citations as there are are a mix of formats. Would anyone object to my giving the article a modest overhaul to address these points? Tim riley talk 08:31, 19 October 2020 (UTC)

Much appreciated. I have tried to at least get the etymology right. This is most certainly a very well travelled word and dish. I have also thought that Lapskaus possibly should be redirected to this article and that the Norwegian recipe should be in this article. Labskaus has too many interwiki-links to put into this article, but it is a variation of the scouse dish. The differences and similarities between the different versions of lapskaus/labskaus/lobscouse should be better described. --regards ^ツDyveldi ^{☯ prat} _{✉ post} 18:48, 19 October 2020 (UTC)

It is also an interwikiproblem as Labskaus has all the interwikis, but the Scandinavian twins are for the most part not about the German variant. Is it possible to combine this one with Labskaus? --regards ^ツDyveldi ^{☯ prat} _{✉ post} 18:54, 19 October 2020 (UTC)

I say! I'm not sure I'm up to dealing with inter-wiki problems, but thank you for your approval of my suggested tidying up. I'll leave this thread open for a day or two just in case anyone wants to object. Tim riley talk 16:49, 20 October 2020 (UTC)

I've had a first go at tidying the article up, adding some new material, streamlining some of the prose and adding missing citations where I can. Do dive and re-edit anything that looks wrong. The citations are now, I think, better than before, but could do with a little further work. I've left the f--regards ^ツDyveldi ^{☯ prat} _{✉ post} 18:46, 23 October 2020 (UTC)ootnote about Schüssel for the moment but I don't understand what it relates to, as there is no mention of the word in the main text. Advice most welcome on this point. Sadly, I have found it necessary to delete the references to Wigan, St Helens and Stoke, as I cannot find any reliable sources for them. It woud be good to have them restored if anyone can find a WP:RS.

I agree cordially with Dyveldi that we should consider whether it is practicable to coordinate Wikipedia's presentation of scouse, lobscouse, lapskaus and Labskaus. Perhaps a standard form of words in the leads of each article on the lines of "It is generally believed to be a variant of lobscouse, lapskaus and Labskaus"? Or possibly use the "variations" field in the info-box? Tim riley talk 15:28, 22 October 2020 (UTC)

If it is possible to integrate the German Labskaus in this article I can integrate the Norwegian Lapskaus. For the Norwegian recipes sources is available to Norwegians electronically as our National library has scanned almost all books published and made them available on some conditions.

- If this can work it is an easy matter after changing the article to also change the Wikidata interwikilink.

- Afraid I restored the origins section. 1) It is necesary that it is clear that Reich & Pagel are making an unsourced claim. They are not authorities on the subject. OED, Kluge, Falk and Torp are the really important sources. They are the heavy authorities. 2) The article in Der Spiegel does not state a theory, but makes fun of the Baltic connection and calls it gibberish/Gobbledy gook. Both Reich & Pagel and the article in Der Spiegel could possibly be dropped as one of them are not an authority and the other is more of a "fun fact" article which points out liknesses that have nothing to do with etymology. --regards ^ツDyveldi ^{☯ prat} _{✉ post} 18:46, 23 October 2020 (UTC)

OK, but could we have it in English? It is ungrammatical at present and to be honest I can't make sense of it. Tim riley talk 22:30, 25 October 2020 (UTC)

(@Tim riley:, Dyveldi: If I might join the conversation) If there is a merge proposal in here I would have to disagree with it; this article is confused enough as it is.

It is ostensibly about scouse, the meat and potato stew popular on Merseyside, but then talks at length about lobscouse, a sailors dish made from salt meat and ships biscuit. So, which is it? It also mentions Norwegian lapskaus (a stew) and German labskaus (a kind of hash), and some others with similar names. I can see the name (and the names of other, equally varied dishes from the Baltic) derive from a common root, but the dishes don’t. And lumping them all together isn’t going to make that any clearer.
And I have to question the assertion made, without any evidence whatsoever, that scouse is 'almost certainly' German in origin. Scouse is a poor man's stew, made from whatever meat and veg is available: The Germans didn’t invent stew! I note Shipperbottoms article is actually about lobscouse, but the claim is still dubious; German labskaus is a form of hash, not a potage of meat and ships biscuit. If anything, the dishes from the Baltic derive their name from the English (viz), not the other way round.
I would suggest (in fact, I am proposing to) beefing up (excuse the pun) the content on scouse (the Merseyside stew), and moving some of the more esoteric German language stuff to the Labskaus page. Thoughts? Swanny18 (talk) 04:54, 13 November 2020 (UTC)

Sounds a good idea to me. Tim riley talk 07:01, 13 November 2020 (UTC)

I have also been conviced that Crowley is the most authoritative and best researched account so far. I started looking for lapskaus/scouse/labskaus etc a long time ago, but unfortunately I did not finish and never added Crowley.

- Crowley says: "Given the commonality of the ingredients (various types of poor-quality meat, potatoes and vegetables), and the historical and geographical provenance of the usage, it seems likely that ‘lobscouse’ referred to a nautical dish eaten by seafarers that was spread through cultural contact along the northern seaboards."... "In which case the fact that a series of related terms for this type of stew exist in modern Norwegian – ‘lapskaus’, Swedish – ‘lapskojs’, Danish – ‘skipperlabskovs’, Dutch – ‘lapskous’ and German – ‘labskaus’ (the dish is a contemporary speciality in the northern ports of Bremen, Lübeck and Hamburg) suggests that the dish may have originated in England and spread through maritime trade with northern Europe." Appendix: Stories of words: naming the place, naming the people section: Naming the natives (ii): ‘Whacker,’ ‘Scouse’ and ‘Scouser’ in Crowley, Tony. Scouse: A Social and Cultural History . Liverpool University Press. Kindle Edition.

Please also note that Crowly quotes what seems to be the earliest list of ingredients of the Liverpool variant in the same appendix: "he cited a parochial report of the early 1790s that listed the expenditure on food per week in the Liverpool poorhouse. It included: ‘Beef, 101 lbs. for scouse’; ‘14 Measures potatoes for scouse’ (420 lbs); and ‘Onions for ditto’ (28 lbs) (Eden 1797: 336). "

This tallyes very well with the rest of the recipes. For instance in Norwegian: meat, potatoes and onions are the main ingredients: Bang, Maren Elisabeth (1843). Huusholdningsbog for Almuen, indeholdende Anviisning til paa bedste og billigste Maade at tillave de paa Landet brugelige Retter, saavel til Hverdags som til Gjestebude, tilligemed Underretning om Brygning, Bagning , Opbevaring av Rødder og Grønt, Nedlægning av Kjød og Fisk m. m., som er gavnligt at vide for den norske Bonde. Guldberg & Dzwonkowski. p. 18. and three recipes in Thams, Hemma (1889). Husholdningsbog bestaaende af supper, fisk og diverse kjødretter. Throndhjem. p. 63.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)

- Shipperbottom and his theory of German origin probably should be lost or modified to follow Crowley who also thinks the trade by sea is important: "Defoe remarked on the fact that Liverpool sent ships ‘to Norway, to Hamburg, and to the Baltick’ (Defoe 2005: 541); while Troughton's figures for the mid to late eighteenth century show that the Nordic trade came third (behind the Irish and Atlantic operations) in terms of numbers of ships and tonnage (Troughton 1810: 261–66). It is therefore certainly not inconceivable that ‘lobscouse’ was standard fare on the northern voyages and that for unknown reasons the name of this stew became associated with ships that sailed to and from Liverpool and thus with those who sailed on them. But if this were the case, then it might be expected that ‘lobscouse’, or indeed the elided form ‘scouse’, would have been recorded in some form or another in Liverpool in this period. Yet ‘scouse’ is currently dated as emerging only in the mid nineteenth century; ... " Crowley, Tony. Scouse: A Social and Cultural History . Liverpool University Press. Kindle Edition.

- I find it difficult to separate the modern Liverpoodlian variant from it's origins which must have been with the trade winds. Crowley also connects the variations to each other and to Liverpool. The problem I think is that this was originally variations of a few ingredients common on boats at the time, but in modern times recipes with "exactly defined" ingredients have developed. The recipes have developed to different traditions in several countries in modern times. The article should have a section with subsections for the countries covering the modern recipes.

- The Lithuanian and Lettish connection we probably should loose. I will try to work out a way to find out if scouse/labskaus at all exists in any of these languages and if so what the real name is. I have had a good look at ISBN 9783934106581, but it did not include the word labskaus among the 43 000 words it contained.

- I think there should be one main article, but having this one in addition to Labskaus and Lapskaus is at least one if not two too many. Merging is however out of the question before at least this article is in any sort of proper order. This article is the oldest (created 20 December 2004‎) and Labskaus was created 9 August 2005‎, but has all the interwikilinks. The oldest article should probably be the main article with all the language links. When this one is in order it would be necessary to alert some of the other languages of the changes. The Norwegian I can handle and Lapskaus can probably just be a redirect. Square one will be to get this one in order and first of all use Crowley for all his book is worth.

- I would apreciate if it now was possible to go back to the original quotation style and drop the Harvard variation, i. e. give full quotations in the references. --regards ^ツDyveldi ^{☯ prat} _{✉ post} 15:59, 14 November 2020 (UTC)

Swanny18, I think if you will move the lobscouse stuff, as you suggest, we can then clean up the references on the scouse page, which I had tidied up a bit but are now a mess again – I'm happy to attend to that. Tim riley talk 21:21, 15 November 2020 (UTC)

Please do not change previous citation style, i.e. do not use the Harvard reference style, but restore the system with complete references. This because if you hover over the reference number it is possible to se all of the reference. Shortend versions like (Crowley 2012) is meaningless when you hover and you need to leave the text you are reading to search for the full reference at the bottom of the article. Afterward you must search back to where you were to continue reading. --regards ^ツDyveldi ^{☯ prat} _{✉ post} 23:15, 15 November 2020 (UTC)

@Tim riley:, Dyveldi: My apologies for not replying sooner: I was having trouble getting my head around what to put in here, and how to blend it in.

I’ve expanded the content on scouse itself, and de-emphasized the Shipperbottom stuff. There’s still a lot of German stuff about word origin, but I’m unsure how much to move.

Dyveli: I see you are still keen on merging these pages together; can I ask why? What would be the rationale for doing that? Merging articles isn’t an end in itself. Although the names seem to come from the same root, we seem to be talking about (at least) three different dishes here. And they are all (AFAICT) discrete subjects warranting their own articles, even though they might be short. Swanny18 (talk) 07:26, 19 November 2020 (UTC)

PS: I notice that when I looked at the Norwegian article, Google translates lapskaus as "stew"; do you know, is lapskaus a generic term for stew in Norway? It might explain a lot if it is. And, do you know what Danish skipperlabskovs is like? Is it the same as north German labskaus, or is it something else? If so, do you know which came first? Swanny18 (talk) 07:28, 19 November 2020 (UTC)

Thanks Swanny18. I think the etymology bit should be expanded with Crowley, but as it starts out it tallies well with Crowley.

- I think first of all that this article should be expanded. It is well on the way. Reading Crowley the Liverpool scouse seems to be the "origin" of all the rest and as the article is expanded I think this should be the article with the interwikilinks to the rest of the world. It is with scouse/lobscouse it all started and developed. Looking at both the beginning and development of the Norwegian recipes they look very much like the English recipes. Looking at the ingredients of scouse you may talk about several different dishes (ex with different kinds of meat or vegetarian). At present I do not think the Norwegian variations warrants an article of their own. In Norwegian you also today find lapskaps with different kinds of meat or vegetarian. Likewise I do not think we should create an article about the New Foundland scouse. A decision about a merge is premature. Let's see how this developes.

- Scouse is listed as a stew in that article so I guess scouse is a kind of stew. In Norwegian we probably would not call labskaus (or scouse) stuing/stew at all, but I'll need to research and rewrite the Norwegian twin to stew before I am certain. Labskaus most certainly is not a generic term meaning stew in Norwegian. As to what Norwegian lapskaus looks like today you'll find pictures here [[1]][[2]].

- I will look into the Danish, but in both German and Danish dk:Skipperlabskovs is a redirect and the recipe in Danish is much like the Norwegian, Swedish and liverpoodlian. It is the German recipes that looks different from the rest of the world. Both the egg and the herrings and some of the rest seems to be German only.

- Yes, reading Crowley I think Shipperbottom has made a mistake assuming this originated in German ports. Crowley is definitely well researched and although he tells us how much we do not know his research clearly points towards this travelling to the German ports with English trade.

- I will look into the etymology. Especially see if I can find out anything about what it is called in Latvian and Lithuanian. Here we have to bear in mind that the Baltic countries was "ruled" by Baltic Germans at the time when scouse started spreading with the sailors. Swedish also was an influence in the area, see Estonian Swedish. There must have been a several languages spoken at the same time in these harbors.

- I'll see if I can develop the etymology bit. Etymology is traditionally the first section after the lead. It does quite often tell a lot about origins and development of the dish including contents should come next. Any thoughts? --regards ^ツDyveldi ^{☯ prat} _{✉ post} 09:13, 19 November 2020 (UTC)

@Dyveldi:: Thanks for your comments (sorry for not replying sooner) and thanks for checking on the Danish and Norwegian stuff. I was a bit surprised lapskaus isn’t a generic name for stew there; I suppose Google Translate was playing games with me. In fact I have wondered whether lobscouse was once a generic word in English for a cheap stew, given the similarity between Liverpool scouse, and Staffordshire lobby, and North Wales lobscaws, while at the same time being a very different dish to sailors lobscouse. Who knows?

I’ve made a couple of changes; I’ve put the first paragraph of the Description back in the Origin of the Dish section; I moved it earlier, but on second thoughts it fits better where it was. I’ve also added another image; as this one states categorically that it is scouse, it seemed a good idea to use it.

Anyway, happy editing, Swanny18 (talk) 06:24, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

- a stew is a single pot dish meaning its cooked together and will mix by cooking like MANY dishes.

- potatoes originate from South-America and were introduced by sir drake in england afaik. which year? it determens part off the origin as after the middievals.

- The norge connection suggests vikings like with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirral_Peninsula which is at neigbour of Liverpool and appear to eat the same single pot dish. 85.149.83.125 (talk) 12:28, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

Lobscouse in Norway

The dish is called «Lapskaus» in Norwegian. 158.248.97.83 (talk) 16:33, 17 November 2022 (UTC)