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Casserole of Potatoes
Boil a pound or two of potatoes and when well done take them out and mash and make this into a stiff paste by adding a little butter and cream, together with a slight sprinkling of salt, and form it into a casserole; put it on a dish, make an opening in the center, brown it over in the oven, and serve.
This is not a baked casserole in the modern American sense. It is a shaped case of stiff mashed potato, browned in the oven and filled at table — the classical French bordure or potato croustade.
- "Casserole" means the shape, not the potIn Oscar's kitchen a casserole is the vessel itself, here modelled out of potato: a walled dish with a hollow center. The recipe does not say what the opening is for, but such cases were customarily filled at table with a ragout, creamed chicken, sweetbreads or a stew.
- Quantity is loose"A pound or two" is genuinely vague, and the recipe gives no yield or dimensions. Two pounds will build a noticeably larger case than one; scale the butter and cream by feel rather than by rule.
- Choose a floury potatoRussets or another high-starch potato mash dry and hold a wall. Waxy potatoes turn slack and the sides will slump in the oven. Steam or boil whole in the skin, peel hot, and dry the mash briefly over low heat before enriching it.
- Stiff means stiffThe hinge of the dish. Add butter and cream sparingly — a couple of tablespoons of butter and a splash of cream per pound — until the paste holds a sharp edge when piped or shaped. Anything looser will spread flat under heat. Kitchens of the period often worked an egg yolk into such a paste for the same reason, though Oscar does not call for one here.
- Browning temperatureThe recipe gives neither temperature nor time. "Brown it over in the oven" implies a hot oven and a short stay -- a modern equivalent would be roughly 425-450F for 15 to 20 minutes, long enough to set and color the outside without drying the whole thing. A brush of melted butter or a little cream over the surface helps the color.
- Build it on the serving dishThe recipe has the case put on a dish before it is browned, so it bakes and comes to table on the same vessel. Transferring a shaped case after baking risks breaking it.
- ServingIf the hollow is to be filled, fill it immediately before serving, while both case and filling are hot. It is a garnish and a container at once, and it does not hold up long.
Oscar Tschirky was maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf, not its chef, but his 1896 book records the house repertoire at a moment when American hotel cooking was almost wholly French in vocabulary. The word casserole comes from the French for a pan. Potato borders and croustades were standard in the grand service of the period: they dressed up a leftover ragout, they gave a plated dish height at a time when height mattered, and they let a kitchen send out something that looked composed without a pastry cook.