Planked Eggs
Finely chop cold cooked corned beef or corned tongue; there should be two-thirds cup. Add an equal quantity of fine bread crumbs, moisten with cream and season with salt and pepper. Spread mixture on plank, and make nests and border of duchess potatoes, using rose tube. Put a buttered or poached egg in each nest and put in oven to brown potato. Garnish with tomatoes cut in halves and broiled, and parsley. Eggs may be sprinkled with buttered cracker crumbs, just before sending to oven, if preferred.
A composed leftovers dish built on a hardwood serving plank, from the era when planked service was a hotel flourish. The eggs are already cooked when they go in, so the oven stage is only about color.
- The hinge: the oven is for the potato, not the eggThe eggs go in poached or buttered, meaning cooked. The recipe gives no temperature or time; only a few minutes in a hot oven, or a moment under the broiler, just until the piped potato takes color. Longer and the yolks set hard and the whites turn rubbery.
- The plankA cooking plank is a seasoned hardwood board, traditionally oak, oiled and heated before use; the food is served on it. An untreated oak or maple plank soaked and warmed works, or use a heavy oval gratin dish or a rimmed sheet pan if you only want the effect.
- "Buttered egg"In period usage a buttered egg is generally one cooked gently in butter until just set rather than fried crisp, though the term is elsewhere used for scrambled eggs. Poached is the easier route here since the egg has to move to the nest intact.
- Duchess potatoesNot given here because it appears elsewhere in the book: hot riced potato beaten with butter, egg yolk, salt and a little hot milk, stiff enough to hold a piped shape. Figure about 2 lb potatoes for four nests and a border.
- "Rose tube"A large star pastry tip, roughly a #6B or 1M in modern numbering, in a piping bag. The potato must be warm when piped or it will tear.
- Corned tongueCooked corned beef tongue was a common larder item in Farmer's day and can still be had from a good butcher or a deli counter. Corned beef brisket is the easy substitute; either way rinse and taste before salting, as the mixture is already salty.
- MoisteningThe recipe does not specify which cream, and period usage covers both thin and heavy; "moisten" means a few tablespoons only. The hash layer should hold together under the potato, not run.
- Broiled tomatoesHalve, season, dot with butter and broil 3-4 minutes cut side up. Do them alongside rather than on the plank, where they will weep into the hash.
- YieldTwo-thirds cup meat plus two-thirds cup crumbs is a base for about four eggs, so four modest servings or two generous ones.
Planked cookery came to nineteenth-century American restaurants by way of an older fireside method, generally traced to Native American practice on the Atlantic coast and the Great Lakes, in which fish was fixed to a board and set upright before the fire; planked shad was its most famous survival. By Fannie Farmer's day the plank had become a piece of hotel and chafing-dish theater, a heated board on which steak, fish, or in this case eggs arrived framed by piped potato, and the Boston Cooking-School book gives several such dishes. Its place in the Eggs chapter says something about how these books worked: cold corned beef from an earlier meal is chopped, extended with bread crumbs, and dressed up with duchess potatoes and a broiled tomato until it can be sent to the table as a company breakfast or a light supper.