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Potato Casserole
2 cups of mashed potatoes, 1 tablespoonful of butter, Yolks of four eggs, 1 gill of cream.
Add the yolks of the eggs, cream and butter to the potaoes and stir over the fire until hot. Beat until very light, add the salt and pepper to taste. Form this mixture in a neat border on a tin sheet or old platter. Brush it over with beaten egg, put in the oven until a golden brown. Fill the space with fricasseed chicken, rabbit, or fricassee of veal, and serve.
POTATOES, à la MAITRE D'HÔTEL.
Boil four good-sized potatoes and cut them into dice. Put them in a saucepan, add a half pint of stock, cook slowly about ten minutes. Season with salt and pepper and turn them into a heated dish. Have ready one tablespoonful of butter, one tablespoonful of chopped parsley and a teaspoonful of lemon juice well rubbed together. Spread this over the potatoes and serve at once. These are nice served with broiled, salt fish.
Two recipes have run together on this page: a piped potato border to hold a fricassee, and diced potatoes finished with maître d'hôtel butter. Both are straightforward once the period vocabulary is unpicked.
- "Casserole" here is a shape, not a dishIn this period a potato casserole means a wall or border of stiff mashed potato built on a flat surface to contain a stew — what a French kitchen would call a bordure. Nothing is baked in a covered pot.
- A gillHalf a cup, so 4 fl oz of cream to 2 cups of mashed potato. That plus four yolks and butter makes a rich but still pipeable mixture; if it slumps, dry it further over the heat before shaping.
- Stir over the fireThe point of heating the yolk-and-cream mixture in the pan is to drive off moisture and set the eggs slightly so the border holds its walls. Keep it moving over moderate heat or the yolks will scramble in streaks.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A hot oven, around 425F, should brown the egg-washed surface in roughly 12 to 15 minutes without drying the interior; at a moderate 350F expect much less colour.
- "A tin sheet or old platter"A rimmed baking sheet works, but the border must be transferred to a serving dish after baking unless you build it on an ovenproof platter — which is presumably why the recipe says an *old* platter, one you would not mind risking in the oven. Grease it well; egg-washed potato sticks.
- The fillingFricasseed chicken, rabbit or veal means meat cooked in a pale sauce, added only after the border is browned and hot. Making it in advance and reheating is the practical order of work.
- Stock for the diced potatoesHalf a pint is a cup. Ten minutes of slow cooking is meant to finish potatoes that are already boiled, not to cook them from raw — they should absorb most of the stock and glaze rather than sit in liquid.
- Maître d'hôtel butterButter, parsley and lemon juice worked together cold, then melted by the heat of the potatoes. Do not melt it in advance; the emulsion breaks and the parsley darkens.
- YieldNo yield is stated. Two cups of mashed potato makes a border for roughly four as the base of a main course; the four boiled potatoes will serve about three or four as a side.
The potato border belongs to the family of dishes built on pommes duchesse — mashed potato enriched with yolks and butter until it is stiff enough to pipe or mould, then egg-washed and browned. Borders of this kind were a familiar way to dress up a fricassee, doing the work that a pastry case or a ring mould of rice might otherwise do, and letting a modest amount of stewed chicken or rabbit look like a composed dish. The second recipe carries a name from the same borrowed French vocabulary. Butter creamed with parsley and lemon is generally traced to the maître d'hôtel, the head of the dining room, and by this date the phrase had come to mean simply that compound butter, applied to grilled meat, fish or vegetables.