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Fish in Potato Border
Warm up some left-over fish in white sauce, mash potatoes lightly, and make a border of them, leaving the center for the fish. Pour the warmed up fish in the center, sprinkle greased crumbs lightly over the whole, and set high in the oven till brown.
A leftovers dish with no measurements at all, which is normal for this kind of entry — the amounts are whatever fish you have. A few points make it work as written.
- White sauce, proportionsThe book assumes you already know it. A standard medium white sauce of the period runs about 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk, cooked until it coats a spoon. Keep it on the thick side, since flaked fish releases liquid and a thin sauce will slump under the potato wall.
- "Set high in the oven"The upper part of the oven was the usual browning position on ranges of this period. In a modern oven, the top rack at around 425F for 10-15 minutes, or 2-3 minutes under the broiler once everything is hot through, will do the same job.
- Greased crumbsDry breadcrumbs tossed with melted butter until they look damp but still loose — roughly 1 tablespoon butter to 1/2 cup crumbs. Unbuttered crumbs will scorch in spots and stay pale in others.
- The hinge: everything goes in hotThis is a browning operation, not a cooking one. Fish, sauce and potatoes should all be hot when assembled; the oven is only there to colour the top. If you build it cold you will need long enough in the oven to dry the fish out.
- Piping the border"Mash lightly" most likely means mashing without working the potato to a slack pur o to to hold a wall. Pipe it through a large star tube or push it up with the back of a spoon into a rim, on a shallow buttered gratin dish or ovenproof platter.
- Reheated fishUse cooked fish that has been refrigerated and is no more than a couple of days old, and flake it off the bone before it goes into the sauce. Warm it in the sauce only until heated through — simmering flaked cooked fish breaks it to paste.
- YieldAs a rough guide, about 2 cups of flaked fish and 4 cups of mashed potato will serve four. Season the sauce firmly with salt and pepper; leftover fish is bland and the potato dilutes it further.
Dishes served "in a border" or *en bordure* appear in late Victorian and Edwardian cookery, borrowed from French service, where a piped rim of potato, rice or forcemeat both contained a saucy mixture and made a modest amount of it look like a composed dish. Its usefulness was economic: a household with one cooked fish needed to get a second meal out of it, and a border turned reheated scraps into something that could go to table whole. The instructions assume white sauce and buttered crumbs are already second nature and spend their words only on the shape of the finished dish.