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Turkey Hash En Bordure
Detach all the meat from the turkey left over from yesterday and cut into very small, square pieces; keep on a plate until required. Mix in a small saucepan a tablespoon butter with one and a half tablespoons flour; stir well while heating for half a minute; pour in a gill cream and a gill milk. Mix well until it comes to a boil, then add the turkey. Season with a half teaspoon salt, a saltspoon cayenne pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg; lightly mix and let simmer for ten minutes. Remove and keep hot. Slide a fancy tube at the bottom of a pastry bag, then drop in a brioche potato preparation, and nicely decorate the border of a baking dish with it. Pour the hash in the centre of the dish, sprinkle a tablespoon Parmesan cheese over it and place in the oven for ten minutes. Remove and serve.
A leftover-turkey cream hash baked inside a piped potato border. The cooking is straightforward; the archaic measures and the phrase "brioche potato preparation" are what need translating.
- A gillHalf a cup, so this is 1/2 cup cream plus 1/2 cup milk — a cup of liquid to a tablespoon of butter and 1 1/2 tablespoons flour. That gives a sauce loose enough to bind the meat without setting stiff in the oven.
- A saltspoonAbout 1/4 teaspoon. A full 1/4 teaspoon of cayenne in a cup of cream sauce is assertive by modern taste; start with half that if you are serving it to a mixed table. The nutmeg at the same quantity is correct and is doing most of the flavouring work.
- Brioche potato preparationNot bread dough. This is the piping potato of the period — riced potato beaten with butter and egg yolk, in the duchesse manner. It must be stiff enough to hold a ridge and warm enough to pipe; cold potato will crack out of the bag.
- The fancy tubeMost likely a large star tip, though the original specifies only a decorative one. Pipe a continuous raised rim around the inside edge of a shallow gratin dish, working while the potato is hot, and leave the centre bare for the hash.
- Oven heatThe original gives none, since this is a browning step only. A hot oven, 400-425F, for ten minutes will colour the potato and the cheese without drying the sauce.
- The ten-minute simmerThe turkey is already cooked, so this is about thickening and marrying the sauce, not cooking meat. Keep it at a bare simmer and stir; a hard boil will break the cream and toughen the diced breast.
- CheeseA tablespoon of Parmesan over the whole dish is a light dusting rather than a gratin topping. Two or three tablespoons, freshly grated, browns more evenly.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of meat, only the sauce (a cup of liquid). Reckoning roughly a pound of picked turkey to that cup of sauce, it will serve four as a main course, more as a light supper dish with a salad.
"En bordure" — within a border — was a standard restaurant presentation in the era of Alexander Filippini, the Delmonico's man whose International Cook Book collected a great many such formulas. A piped rim of duchesse potato turned a bowl of creamed leftovers into something that could be sent to table in the dish it was browned in, and the same trick framed everything from creamed sweetbreads to fish. The opening line, "the turkey left over from yesterday," places it squarely in the day-after tradition, and the cream, nutmeg and Parmesan are the hotel kitchen's way of dressing that thrift up. Duchesse potato itself is generally traced to French professional cookery of the nineteenth century, where the addition of egg yolk to riced potato made it pipeable and gave it a glaze in the oven.