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Potatoes on the Half Shell
Select smooth, large, uniform sized potatoes; wash and scrub them carefully with a brush. Bake and cut them in halves lengthwise; scoop out the pulp from shells, being careful not to break them. Press pulp through a ricer; season with salt, pepper, butter and hot cream. Add one teaspoon finely chopped parsley (to five potatoes), whip mixture until fluffy, refill shells with mixture, using pastry bag and rose tube. Place in oven until heated through. Dispose around Finnan Haddie, interspersed with sprays of parsley.
A twice-baked potato in its 1913 dress, meant as a garnish ring around a platter of smoked haddock. The technique still holds; only the oven temperatures and quantities need filling in.
- Baking the shellsBake at 425F for 50-60 minutes for large russets, until a skewer slides through easily. A softer bake leaves the shell too flimsy to scoop and pipe.
- Work hotSplit and scoop while the potatoes are still too hot to hold comfortably. Cooled potato pressed through a ricer turns pasty, and pasty filling will not whip fluffy.
- Hot cream, not coldThe instruction to use hot cream is the hinge. Cold dairy chills the starch and dulls the mixture; scald the cream and butter together and beat it in a little at a time.
- QuantitiesFor five large potatoes, allow about 3 tablespoons butter and 1/3 to 1/2 cup cream, plus the teaspoon of parsley. Judge by feel: stiff enough to hold a piped ridge, loose enough to move through the tube.
- RicerA potato ricer or food mill is genuinely better here than a masher, and a food processor is worse. Blade-work overworks the starch into glue.
- Rose tubeA "rose tube" is a large open star tip. Any 1/2-inch star tip gives the same fluted finish; a spoon and a fork work if you are not garnishing a platter.
- ReheatingTwenty to twenty-five minutes at 375F heats them through and colours the piped ridges. Run them briefly under the broiler if you want more browning.
- Finnan haddieCold-smoked haddock, sold as finnan haddie or smoked haddock fillet, and always cooked before eating: poach it in milk. Any baked or poached fish serves as well if you are not following the book's menu.
- YieldFive potatoes give ten halves, enough to ring a platter for six as a garnish or to serve four or five as a side dish.
Elizabeth O. Hiller built 52 Sunday Dinners around complete menus, which is why this recipe ends by telling you where to put the potatoes on the platter rather than how many it feeds — it exists to encircle the finnan haddie in one of the book's dinners. Finnan haddie itself is smoked haddock, the name generally traced to Findon, a fishing village south of Aberdeen, and it reached American tables through Scottish curing houses and the transatlantic trade in cured fish. The piped potato border was a fixture of turn-of-the-century American cookery schools, where the pastry bag was taught as a savoury tool as much as a sweet one: duchesse potato rosettes, borders and baskets appear frequently in domestic-science manuals of the 1900s and 1910s, a small piece of restaurant garde-manger style handed down to the home cook.