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Potato Border
Place a buttered mould on platter, build around it a wall of hot Mashed Potatoes, using nine potatoes, three and onehalf inches high by one inch deep, smooth, and crease with case knife. Remove mould, fill with creamed meat or fish, and reheat in oven before serving.
This is a serving structure rather than a dish in itself: a ring of stiff mashed potato that holds a creamed filling. Everything depends on the potato being dry and stiff enough to stand.
- The hinge: stiff, dry potatoA wall three and a half inches high will slump if the mash is loose. Use a starchy potato (russet), dry the drained slices over low heat for a minute before mashing, and keep the milk and butter modest. Duchesse-style mash with an egg yolk beaten in holds its shape better still and browns well.
- Nine potatoesRead this as nine medium potatoes, very roughly 3 lb, which would mash to something in the region of 6 cups. The recipe gives no yield or serving count; how far it goes depends on the size of the platter.
- The mouldThe mould is not baked in; it is a form. Any straight-sided bowl, tin, or cake pan of the diameter you want the well to be will do, buttered so the potato releases cleanly. Build the wall against it, then lift it straight up.
- "Crease with case knife"A case knife is an ordinary blunt table knife. Pressing its flat side into the surface at intervals gives a fluted finish; the back of a spoon or a piping bag with a star tube achieves the same thing.
- ReheatingThe recipe gives no temperature or time. A hot oven for ten to fifteen minutes will heat it through and colour the ridges. Brush the potato with milk or melted butter first, or the peaks scorch before the filling is hot.
- The filling"Creamed meat or fish" means cooked meat or flaked fish in a white sauce, already hot when it goes in. The oven stage is a reheat and a browning, not a cooking step; a cold raw filling will not come up to temperature in the time the potato can take.
- ServingServe on the platter it was built on. The border does not transfer, so carry it to the table whole and portion with a large spoon.
Borders like this belong to the late nineteenth-century fashion for serving dishes en bordure — a savoury mixture presented inside a ring of rice, macaroni, or potato instead of in a plain dish. Such borders may well have solved a practical problem for households without a battery of ovenware: a creamed hash or a little leftover salmon could be made to look like a composed course on any platter to hand. The technique is often described as a domestic descendant of French service, where the ring was often piped duchesse potato; the domestic version simplifies it to a mould and a table knife.