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Triple Alliance
Cooked potatoes Cooked turnips Cooked meat made into balls Melted butter Reheat the turnips and potatoes in separate dishes placed in a steamer or in boiling water.
Mound the turnips on a hot dish; then cover with the potatoes, mashed and forced through a bag and star tube, or made rough with a fork. Arrange balls of meat here and there about the base. At the top make an indentation, and fill it with melted butter, so that it will trickle down the crinkly sides of the potato.
Triple alliance is a combination of potatoes, turnips and meat.
A leftovers assembly rather than a recipe in the strict sense: no quantities are given because the amounts depend on what is in the refrigerator. A few things need spelling out.
- ProportionsAim for roughly equal volumes of turnip and potato, with the potato layer slightly larger since it has to cover the mound. Figure about 1 lb each of cooked potato and turnip plus 8-12 oz of meat for four servings.
- The hinge: dry turnipsTurnips hold a great deal of water, and a wet base will collapse the potato shell and pool on the platter. Mash them and let them steam dry in the pan over low heat for a few minutes, stirring, before mounding.
- Reheating cooked meat safelyThe original simply says to reheat in a steamer or boiling water. Bring previously cooked meat and vegetables to 165F throughout; the meat balls in particular need to be heated through, not merely warmed on the surface of a hot dish.
- "Cooked meat made into balls"Chopped or ground leftover roast will not hold a ball on its own. Bind it with a little thick gravy, white sauce or beaten egg and breadcrumb, roll walnut-sized, and heat in gravy or a hot oven so they hold shape.
- Bag and star tubeA piping bag with a large star tip. Mashed potato pipes cleanly only if it is stiff and hot; if it is loose, skip the bag and rough the surface with a fork as the recipe allows.
- The butter wellTwo to three tablespoons of melted butter is enough to run down the sides without flooding the dish. Add it at the table, immediately before serving, or it soaks in and disappears.
- ServingThe recipe specifies a hot dish, so warm a shallow platter beforehand; the whole thing is built as a mound to be brought to the table and served at once, with the meat balls taken from around the base.
This comes from a genre of turn-of-the-century books devoted to making the second appearance of a joint of meat look deliberate rather than apologetic: cold roast reappears as balls, and the plainest root vegetables are piped and moulded into something with a silhouette. The name is generally taken as a nod to the Triple Alliance, the treaty binding Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy from 1882, which was familiar newspaper shorthand for any group of three in the decades before the First World War — the author's closing line, defining the alliance as potatoes, turnips and meat, reads as the joke's punchline. Turnips carried little prestige in Anglo-American cookery of the period, and burying them under a piped potato crust fits the era's habit of dressing cheap ingredients in the architecture of a formal entrée.