Home › The Principles of Cookery › Shad, Planked, American
Shad, Planked, American
Scale and empty the fish, cut off the head, and split the shad completely open. Spread it on a board, and fasten it down with pegs or skewers to keep it in position. Put it before a clear fire, and rest the lower end of the plank in a tub containing salt and water. Toast the fish, and keep basting it well with the liquor; when it is almost cooked baste it with butter. Serve on a hot dish, garnish with pickled walnuts, and send melted butter flavoured with walnut ketchup to table in a tureen.
Planking is open-fire cooking, and the whole method depends on radiant heat striking the cut face of a split fish held vertically. A grill lid or a hot oven will get you close; the points below cover the substitutions that matter.
- The hinge: skin to the board, flesh to the fireThe recipe does not say which way round the fish goes, but planking practice is to butterfly it and pin it skin-side to the plank so the cut face takes the radiant heat. If you turn it, or lay it flat, you are simply baking fish on wood.
- The plankUntreated wood only he cedar (the usual planking choice, though a softwood), oak, maple or alder — never plywood, never anything glued or varnished. If you are using it on a grill, soaking it about an hour helps it smoulder rather than burn; expect it to char on the fire side.
- Fire equivalents"A clear fire" means wood or charcoal burnt down past flame to steady radiant heat, propped so the plank leans in at an angle. In a covered kettle grill or an oven, 425–450F gets you close; start checking a 3 lb split fish at about 20 minutes. There will be no smoke flavour.
- The tub of salt and waterThe plank's lower end sits in brine so that drippings run down and mix with it, giving a basting liquor. Keep it light — about 2 tablespoons salt per quart — or the repeated basting will oversalt the fish. Butter goes on only at the end so it does not blacken.
- Melted butterIn Victorian and Edwardian British cookery books this almost always means a flour-thickened butter sauce, not simply butter melted in a pan. Walnut ketchup is a thin, dark, spiced condiment; mushroom ketchup or a small amount of Worcestershire sauce stands in for it.
- Sourcing shadAmerican shad is a spring-run river fish, and stocks are much reduced from what they were when this book was printed; several states now restrict or close the fishery, so check local rules and buy from a licensed dealer. Bluefish, mackerel, or a butterflied salmon side takes to planking the same way.
- The bonesShad is notoriously bony — a lattice of fine floating bones in rows along the fillet. Have the fishmonger bone it if possible; otherwise serve it as the original intends, on the bone, and warn the table.
- YieldA whole shad of 3–4 lb, split and planked, serves three to four as a main course.
Planking is one of the few genuinely American techniques to enter British cookery books, and Cassell's flags it as such in the title. It is generally traced to Native fishing practice along the Atlantic rivers, taken up by colonists along the Chesapeake and the Delaware and Connecticut valleys, where the spring run of shad up from the sea was a fixed point of the calendar and an excuse for a large outdoor gathering. In the earlier, most abundant period shad was cheap enough to be dismissed as a poor man's fish; the roe was prized more than the flesh. The English touches here — pickled walnuts, walnut ketchup, a tureen of melted butter — are Cassell's translating an open-air American ritual into something that could be sent to a dining room table.