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Planked Shad
Clean and split down the back a good 3-pound shad. Heat plank very hot, lay fish upon it, skin side down, or that portion will be raw. The hot plank cooks it. Brush flesh carefully over with olive oil, then sprinkle with salt and pepper. Bake for 30 minutes in a hot oven. Baste frequently with melted Crisco. It may be cooked in a gas range having the flame over the fish. When cooked pour over the fish 2 tablespoons melted Crisco and juice of 1 lemon. Garnish with parsley and quarters of lemon. Set the plank on a serving dish and serve with butter sauce.
A plank-roasted shad from a promotional cookbook built around Crisco. The method is sound, but almost everything about the equipment and the fish needs translating.
- The plank is the cooking surfaceUse an untreated hardwood board — oak, hickory or maple — at least an inch thick, never softwood, plywood or anything glued or finished. Oil it and heat it in the oven until it is thoroughly hot before the fish goes on, or the skin side will steam rather than sear.
- "A hot oven"Roughly 400-450F in the terms of the period. The fish is thin once split, so the heat is doing quick work rather than a long roast.
- Check the fish, not the clockThirty minutes is generous for a split 3-pound shad at that heat. Start checking at 18–20 minutes; the flesh should flake at the thickest point, around 145F.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, and the reason this recipe exists — the book was published to sell it. Melted butter or a neutral oil does the same job and tastes better in the finishing spoonful over the fish.
- Broiler in place of the overhead flameThe "gas range having the flame over the fish" is a broiler. On a plank under a broiler, keep the board four to five inches from the element and watch the edges, which will char before the fish is done.
- Shad bonesShad is notoriously fine-boned, with rows of floating intermuscular bones that no amount of cooking dissolves. Ask for it boned by a fishmonger who knows the cut, or expect to eat carefully.
- SourcingAmerican shad runs have declined sharply and several Atlantic states have closed or restricted their fisheries. Buy from a managed run in spring, or substitute another oily fillet fish; the plank technique is indifferent to species.
- Butter sauce and yieldThe "butter sauce" of the period is drawn butter — melted butter thickened lightly with flour and thinned with water or fish stock, seasoned and finished with lemon. The recipe gives no yield; a 3-pound fish would serve about four.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that flourished in the early twentieth century: the cookbook issued by a manufacturer, with its product written into nearly every page. That is why melted Crisco appears twice in a recipe that is often said to have used butter or salt pork. Planking itself is far older than the shortening. Cooking split fish nailed or propped on a board before an open fire is a technique generally traced to Native peoples of the Atlantic seaboard, and it was adopted wholesale by colonists along the shad rivers the Connecticut, the Hudson, the Delaware, the Potomac. Shad ran in enormous numbers each spring, and communal shad bakes, with fish planked around a bed of coals, became a fixture of the season; Virginia's Shad Planking has carried the custom into political ritual since the mid-twentieth century. By the time this book was printed, the plank had migrated indoors to the gas range, and the open fire survived only in the instruction to get the board very hot first. That the recipe sits under "Eggs" is a filing accident of the original volume, not a clue about the dish.