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Boiled Fish in Potato Border
2 cups cooked fish, hard cooked eggs flaked 2 cups hot or cold mashed potato cup drawn butter sauce (see page 70) 1 tablespoonful minced parsley Press the two cups of well-seasoned mashed potato through a ricer, letting it fall lightly around the edge of a flat baking-platter to form a border.
In the center of the dish put alternate layers of fish, sliced eggs, and sauce, sprinkling each layer with a very little minced parsley. Place in a hot oven until sauce bubbles. Serve in the baking-platter.
A reheated-fish supper dressed up as a piped-potato entrée. The whole thing succeeds or fails on the sauce: it must be loose enough to keep the fish moist through its second cooking.
- Drawn butter sauceNot melted butter but the period's basic thickened sauce, made with water or fish stock rather than milk: typically a couple of tablespoons each of butter and flour cooked together, whisked with a cup of hot liquid and finished with more butter, though proportions vary from book to book (this one refers you to its own page 70). A thin bechamel or a light veloute made with fish stock does the same job.
- Missing quantitiesThe original reads "cup drawn butter sauce" with the number apparently lost in transcription, and gives no count for the eggs. One cup of sauce and two or three hard-cooked eggs suit 2 cups of fish; the "I tablespoonful" of parsley is almost certainly a 1.
- A hot ovenIn period usage roughly 400-450F. Everything is already cooked, so you are only bringing the sauce to a bubble and setting the potato edge - 10 to 15 minutes, not longer, or the fish dries and toughens.
- The ricer mattersRiced potato falls in light strands that hold their shape without being worked smooth; mashed potato spooned into a wall goes dense and slumps. A piping bag with a wide star tube is the modern equivalent.
- Cold potatoThe recipe allows cold mashed potato as well as hot. If you use it, add a few minutes in the oven and brush the border with melted butter so it colours rather than merely drying out.
- Season the fish, not just the potatoLeftover boiled fish is bland by definition. Salt, pepper and lemon juice on the flakes before layering, plus "well-seasoned" potato as instructed, is what keeps this from tasting like reheating.
- BakewareA "flat baking-platter" is a shallow ovenproof dish taken straight to table. Any gratin dish or metal-handled shallow skillet works; something with sides an inch high keeps the sauce from creeping under the border.
- YieldServes three to four as a main course with a green vegetable or two.
Cookbooks devoted to left-overs proliferated in America and Britain from the 1890s through the First World War, when household economy was a moral as much as a financial matter and the icebox made it plausible to keep cooked fish overnight. The potato border, called a bordure in French kitchens, was often recommended as a way of turning a scrap of anything into something that could be carried to the table without apology: it framed the dish, absorbed the sauce, and stretched two cups of fish across a family. Boiled fish was commonly served for Friday or fast-day dinner in much of the period, and it frequently produced more than was eaten. Drawn butter sauce, the flour-and-butter sauce that recurs throughout these books, was the workhorse binder before the era of canned soup took over the same role.