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Planked Eggs
Prepare a mixture of one cup of finely chopped cold corned beef or ham, the same quantity of bread crumbs, and cream enough to make a paste. Spread this mixture on a plank of suitable size, make a border of Duchess potatoes, also several nests. Into each nest slip a poached egg and set in oven until potato border turns a delicate brown. Garnish with alternating slices of tomato and rings of green peppers.
A hash-and-egg supper dish built for presentation: the plank is both cooking vessel and platter. The one thing to get right is the eggs, which are poached before they go in the oven and will keep cooking there.
- The plankA hardwood plank, usually oak or hickory, an inch or so thick, seasoned by rubbing with oil and heating slowly in the oven until it stops smoking. An untreated new board will scorch and taste of raw wood. A heavy oval gratin dish or cast-iron platter does the same job if you have no plank.
- Duchess potatoesStiff mashed potato enriched with egg yolk and butter, dry enough to hold its shape through a pastry bag with a large star tip. Roughly 2 lb potatoes, 2-3 yolks and 3 tablespoons butter, seasoned well; too much milk and the border slumps in the oven.
- Oven heatBrowning a potato border wants a hot oven, 425-450F, and only long enough to colour the ridges, five to eight minutes. A slow oven dries the hash and hard-cooks the eggs before any colour appears.
- Poach the eggs softTwo minutes in barely simmering water, lifted out while the yolk is still liquid. They finish in the oven. Eggs poached to firmness first will be chalky by the time the potato browns.
- Cream enough to make a pasteAmbiguous. Start with about 1/3 cup heavy cream into the cup of meat and cup of crumbs and add by tablespoons until the mixture holds together but is not wet; it should spread like a thick stuffing, not pour.
- Corned beef and hamBoth were leftovers in this book's world. Deli corned beef works, but drain and chop it fine; modern packaged ham is wetter and saltier than the home-boiled joint, so hold back on salt until you have tasted the paste.
- Assembly orderPipe the border and the nests first and set the eggs in last, just before the plank goes in. A poached egg sitting in a nest while you pipe will weep water into the potato.
- GarnishTomato slices and pepper rings go on after the plank comes out of the oven, not before; baked they collapse and release liquid across the whole board.
- YieldThe recipe specifies only a plank of 'suitable size' and 'several nests'; two cups of mixture will comfortably carry about four, one egg each, as a luncheon or supper dish. Serve on the plank set on a tray or folded cloth, since it comes out of the oven hot enough to mark a table.
Planked cookery had a long run in American restaurants and hotels from the 1880s through the 1920s, most famously as planked shad and planked steak; the practice is generally traced to Native American methods of cooking fish fastened to a board before an open fire, taken up and made fashionable by chefs who liked the theatre of serving straight from the charred wood. By the time the Butterick Publishing Company issued its cook book, the plank had migrated from the grill to the oven and from fish to almost anything that could be bordered with piped potato: Duchess potatoes, an already old French preparation, were the standard frame because they held a shape and browned handsomely. That this appears among the egg dishes and omelets, made from a cup of cold corned beef, says a good deal about the period's household economy, where yesterday's boiled joint was expected to reappear looking like a hotel dish.