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Potato Croustade
Place a pound of boiled potato pulp in a bowl, mash it very smooth and perfectly dry; add the yolks of a couple of eggs and set the bowl over the fire, stirring it until it again becomes dry. Form it into a case or shell and brush it over with the yolk of egg, place in an oven and bake to a light brown; then remove and it is ready for use. In the meantime pour one gill of white sauce into a saucepan and mix in with it a teaspoonful of lemon-juice, with half that quantity of essence of anchovies, and the meat of a lobster, or half a can of lobster; set the pan at the side of the fire and heat well without letting it boil. Pour this sauce, which should be thick, into the potato case, and serve.
A potato shell standing in for pastry, filled with creamed lobster. The whole thing turns on moisture: wet potato will slump in the oven and the case collapses under the sauce.
- Dry the pulp twiceThe recipe calls for boiled potato, so drain it thoroughly and rice it while hot so the steam escapes (baking or steaming avoids the added water altogether). The second drying over heat after the yolks go in is not optional — the recipe insists on it, and it gives the paste enough body to hold a wall.
- A pound of pulpThat is the cooked, peeled weight, roughly two large russets. The recipe gives no size or yield: a pound of paste will make one fair-sized case or several small ones.
- A gillHalf a cup. It is a small amount of sauce, deliberately — it should coat the lobster, not swim it, or the potato softens from within.
- Forming the caseThe recipe says only 'form it into a case or shell' and gives no method. Pressing the warm paste up the sides of a shallow tart tin or ring is easier than shaping it free-hand and gives straighter walls. Chill it firm before the egg wash.
- OvenNo temperature is given; the instruction is simply to bake to a light brown. A moderately hot oven, around 400F, will colour the egg wash without drying the shell to a crust. Go by the colour rather than the clock.
- Essence of anchoviesA Victorian bottled seasoning, thinner and saltier than modern anchovy paste. Half a teaspoon of paste loosened with a little water is the nearest thing; taste before adding salt, since the white sauce and the paste both carry it.
- White sauceA plain béchamel, made stiff — flour and butter in equal weight, cooked out, then milk added sparingly. It should mound on the spoon before the lobster goes in, because the lobster will release liquid as it warms.
- Do not let it boilThe instruction to hold the pan at the side of the fire is the hinge. Cooked lobster meat toughens and shreds in a boiling sauce; bring it only to steaming and take it off. Canned lobster is already fully cooked and needs no more than warming through.
- Assemble at the last minuteThe case begins to soften the moment the sauce goes in. Bake the shell ahead if you like, but fill it as it goes to the table.
Croustade is a French culinary term for a crust made to be filled, and by the 1890s it covered a range of things hollowed out to hold a ragout — fried bread, puff paste, hollowed rolls, and, as here, a stiff potato paste standing in for pastry. Oscar Tschirky was the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel rather than its chef, but the book works in the Escoffier-era idiom where the vessel was part of the dish, and duchesse potato — riced potato bound with egg yolk — was a standard material for piping borders, nests and cases. Canned lobster, which Oscar offers here as a substitute for the meat of a fresh one, was a familiar pantry article in American kitchens of the period. The bottled essence of anchovies is characteristic of the era — a British seasoning that had crossed into American professional kitchens as a quick way to give a cream sauce depth without a long-simmered stock.