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Potatoes Aurora
Cut cold, boiled potatoes in one-fourth inch cubes. There should be sufficient to fill three cups. Reheat potatoes in two cups of thin white sauce, turn into hot serving dish. Remove the shells from four hard-cooked eggs, cut them in halves crosswise, remove the yolks. Cut whites in rings and arrange rings around edge of potatoes; press the yolks through a ricer over potatoes. Sprinkle the rings with finely chopped parsley. Serve at once.
A simple creamed potato dish whose whole effect depends on assembly and temperature. Everything should be hot and the garnish added at the last moment.
- Thin white sauceIn this period "thin" means about 1 tablespoon each butter and flour per cup of milk, roughly half the thickening of a medium béchamel. For two cups, use 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 2 cups milk, salt and white pepper; it should coat a spoon barely.
- Potato choiceThree cups of quarter-inch cubes is roughly a pound to a pound and a quarter of boiled potatoes. Waxy or all-purpose potatoes hold their edges in the sauce; baking potatoes tend to slump as you reheat them.
- Cook the potatoes aheadThe recipe calls for cold boiled potatoes, which may well have meant leftovers, and cold potatoes do cube more cleanly than warm ones. Boil them whole in their skins the day before and chill them.
- ReheatingFold the cubes into the finished sauce over low heat just until steaming, a few minutes, stirring as little as you can manage. Prolonged simmering breaks the potatoes and the sauce thickens as it reduces.
- Egg whites in ringsCut the eggs crosswise, not lengthwise, so each half yields a hoop of white. Slightly under-hard-cooked eggs tear; twelve minutes off the boil, then an ice bath, gives whites firm enough to slice cleanly.
- A ricer or a sievePressing yolks through a ricer produces fine golden threads over the white sauce. A medium-mesh sieve and the back of a spoon does the same job; a food processor does not.
- YieldServes about four to six as a side dish. It does not hold or reheat well, hence "serve at once" — assemble it while the rest of the meal is going to the table.
This comes from Elizabeth O. Hiller's 52 Sunday Dinners (1915), a book built around complete menus for the American Sunday table. The name appears to point to the appearance rather than to any classical sauce: riced yolk scattered gold over white sauce reads as sunrise, and Aurora was the Roman goddess of the dawn. Professional kitchens of the same era used sauce aurore to mean béchamel or velouté tinted with tomato, so the domestic borrowing here is loose; French names were attached freely to homely dishes in English-language cookbooks of the 1900s and 1910s. The underlying method, stretching cold boiled potatoes with a milk sauce, is older and thriftier than the name suggests.