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Potato Border
9 medium-sized potatoes
1 tablespoon salt
2 tablespoons butter
2 eggs
½ cup hot milk
Wash the potatoes, boil, drain, dry off and put through the ricer. Add butter, hot milk, salt and the well-beaten yolks of the eggs. Beat till very light. Pack into a border mold rubbed with butter, and let it stand away from the heat for eight minutes. Beat the whites of the two eggs to a froth and add one-fourth teaspoon of salt, turn the border on a warm platter, cover it with the beaten white, and brown in a moderate oven. Put meat or fish, heated in sauce, in the center.
A ring of stiff mashed potato used as an edible serving dish for creamed leftovers. The whole thing depends on the potato being dry enough to hold its shape.
- Dry the potatoes properly"Drain, dry off" means returning the drained potatoes to the empty hot pan over low heat for a minute or two until the surface steam has gone. Wet potatoes will slump when unmolded and no amount of beating fixes it.
- Use a starchy potatoRussets or another floury baking potato rice cleanly and hold a piped or molded shape. Waxy new potatoes turn gluey under the ricer and will not stand up as a border.
- Moderate oven350F, and only long enough to color the meringue-like coating of egg white, roughly 8 to 12 minutes. The potato is already cooked; you are browning, not baking.
- The border moldA shallow ring mold, buttered heavily. A standard 8- or 9-inch tube or savarin pan works. The eight minutes standing away from the heat lets the packed potato set so it releases in one piece.
- Hot milk, not coldHalf a cup of scalded milk keeps the mash from cooling and stiffening as you beat, and the mixture takes more air. Cold milk gives a heavier, pastier border.
- Egg whitesBeaten to a froth means soft peaks, not stiff and dry. Spread it over the turned-out ring like a frosting; it puffs slightly and browns unevenly, which is what you want.
- YieldNine medium potatoes is on the order of 3 pounds and makes a border for six to eight, assuming a substantial filling of creamed fish, chicken or hash in the center.
- Timing the fillingHave the meat or fish hot in its sauce before the border goes into the oven. The potato ring cools fast on a platter, so warm the platter and fill it the moment it comes out.
The potato border belongs to the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century habit of serving creamed leftovers inside an edible frame "en bordure" a device borrowed from French service, where a bordure of duchesse potato was piped around a dish before glazing. It sat among the made-over dishes that handled yesterday's roast, and that is the whole point: a cupful of chopped chicken or flaked cod stretched with white sauce looks like a composed course once it sits in a browned ring of potato. The same mash, piped through a bag rather than packed in a mold, is the duchesse potato still found on restaurant plates.