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Planked Eggs
1 cup finely chopped cooked 6 poached eggs ham or corned beef
Garnish of tomato slices
1 cup crums
Green-pepper rings
Cream
1 quart mashed potato
Mix the meat with the crums and enough cream to make a paste. Spread the mixture on a heated plank of suitable size. Around the edge of the plank make a narrow border of mashed potato and inside the border make six nests of the potato. Slip a poached egg into each nest and set in the oven until the potato turns a delicate brown. Garnish with alternate slices of tomato and green-pepper rings.
A composed brunch dish built on a wooden serving plank, a piece of equipment that has largely left the American kitchen. Everything is cooked before it goes into the oven, so the only real work in the oven is browning the potato.
- The plankA cooking plank of this era was a slab of seasoned hardwood, oak and hickory among the woods used, thick enough not to warp, rubbed with oil and heated gradually before use so it would not split or scorch. If you have no plank, a heavy oval gratin dish or a rimmed sheet pan works; the wood contributes very little flavor here since the meat paste covers it.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature, only "until the potato turns a delicate brown." A hot oven, around 425F, should give you color on the potato in five to eight minutes. You want color, not a fully baked dish.
- The hinge: the eggs are already donePoached eggs go in with set whites and liquid yolks. Any oven time past the point where the potato browns will cook the yolks through. Have the potato and meat hot when the plank goes in so the browning happens fast, and poach the eggs last.
- "Crums"Breadcrumbs; the recipe does not say whether dry or fresh. They are here to bind, so with a cup of chopped meat expect to add cream by the spoonful until the mixture holds together like a coarse paste rather than a batter.
- A quart of mashed potatoAbout four cups, from roughly two pounds of potatoes. It should be stiff enough to hold a shape; a wet mash will slump and the eggs will slide. Piping the border and the nests through a large star tip gives ridges that brown well.
- Corned beefCanned or leftover boiled corned beef both work, chopped fine. If the meat is salty, taste before seasoning the potato at all.
- YieldSix eggs, so six servings as a light lunch or supper dish, or three if it is the center of the meal. It does not hold or reheat; serve it off the plank.
Plank cookery was a genuine fashion in American restaurants and hotels around the turn of the twentieth century, and cookbooks of the period reproduce it in a thrifty register. Planked steak and planked shad were the prestige versions, cooked directly on hot hardwood and brought to the table on it; the technique is generally traced to Native American methods of cooking fish lashed to boards before an open fire, adopted and elaborated by nineteenth-century hotel chefs. What appears here is the domestic descendant: the plank has become a presentation dish, the expensive cut has become a cup of chopped leftover ham or corned beef, and the mashed potato piped into nests does the decorative work that a garde-manger would otherwise supply. Recipes of this type, using cooked meat, cooked potato and poached eggs, belong to the long tradition of dignifying leftovers with a formal arrangement and a garnish.