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Planked Chicken (Spring chickens cup boiled)
2 spring chickens, 1 cup boiled rice, 1/2 pound mushrooms, and 1 glass guava jelly. Stew mushrooms; put chicken either in oven or under broiler, bone side to hottest part of fire. Heat and Crisco a plank; put chicken on, bone side down; sprinkle with melted Crisco, dust with salt and pepper and broil on board under gas for 1/2 an hour. Garnish with rice; pour over mushrooms. Place at corners small bread patties, holding the guava jelly.
A 1915 Crisco-book recipe for planked chicken — split birds broiled on a hot hardwood board and served on it. Most of the work is in the plank and the timing.
- The plankUse an untreated hardwood board — oak, hickory or maple, at least an inch thick — never plywood, never a glued cutting board, never softwood. Heat it empty in the oven before greasing it; a cold board will not brown the underside and a thin one will warp or scorch through.
- "Crisco a plank"Simply grease it. Crisco was four years old when this book appeared and the volume exists to sell it; any neutral solid shortening or oil does the same job. Shortening starts smoking around 360F, so expect some haze at broiler heat and run the exhaust fan.
- Spring chickensYoung birds of about 2 to 2 1/2 lb, split down the back. Two modern Cornish game hens or one 3 1/2 lb chicken cut in halves is the closest equivalent; a supermarket roaster is too large and will burn outside before it cooks.
- Half an hour under gasHalf an hour suggests a less fierce heat than a modern element. Under a modern element the birds want to sit 6 to 8 inches down, and they are done when the thickest part of the thigh reads 165F, not when the clock says thirty minutes. Bone side to the heat first, as written, then finish skin side up on the board.
- A glass of guava jellyA glass here means a tumbler or jelly glass, roughly 8 oz. Guava jelly, or Cuban guava paste thinned and warmed, was one of the sweet accompaniments served with broiled poultry; quince or red currant jelly stands in without complaint.
- Bread pattiesNot pastry. These are crustless bread cases — cubes hollowed out, brushed with fat and crisped in the oven — set at the corners of the plank and filled with the jelly at the last minute so they do not go soggy.
- Mushrooms and riceHalf a pound of mushrooms stewed with a little liquid reduces to a modest amount of sauce; season it, since the recipe never says to. The cup of boiled rice is measured cooked, and it is a border, not a stuffing.
- YieldTwo spring chickens on one plank serve four, or two generously. Carry the board to the table on a metal tray — it will be hot enough to scar a tabletop.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble in 1915 as a promotional cookbook for Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening they had introduced in 1911; the fat turns up in nearly every recipe in it, including this one, where it does nothing a spoonful of butter would not do. Planking itself is much older than the shortening: cooking fish or fowl on a hot hardwood board is generally traced to Native American practice along the Atlantic coast, and shad planking survives as a Virginia ritual to this day. By the 1900s hotel dining rooms had turned it into a display dish — the plank came to the table ringed with duchess potatoes, rice or vegetables — and guava jelly, arriving through the Cuban and Florida trade, was a favoured accompaniment to broiled birds.