Planked Shad
1 shad with backbone removed 4 tablespoons butter few drops onion juice 1 tablespoon salt 2 tablespoons finely chopped parsley 2 tablespoons tomato catsup or 2 tablespoons white wine. few grains cayenne Wipe shad; place skin side down on oak plank. Sprinkle with salt and pepper; spread with butter. Cook in hot oven twenty to thirty minutes. Brown with a salamander. Spread with parsley and catsup or white wine. Garnish with highly seasoned hot mashed potato pressed through a pastry bag and tube. Also radishes cut in shape of roses, lemons cut in shape of crescents and dipped in chopped parsley, and sprigs of parsley. 2 pounds whitebait salt, pepper
A plain plank-roast that depends almost entirely on the fish and the heat. Two things in the text need translating before you start: the salamander, and the two stray lines of another recipe that have drifted onto the end of the page.
- The stray last line"2 pounds whitebait salt, pepper" belongs to the next recipe in the section, not to this one. Ignore it.
- "Hot oven"In this period that means roughly 400-450F. The recipe gives no fish size; the twenty to thirty minutes suits a large split shad, and a smaller fish will be done nearer twenty.
- The salamanderA salamander was an iron disc on a handle, heated red in the fire and held over the food to glaze the surface. Your broiler, with the plank moved up close for a minute or two at the end, does the same job.
- The plankUntreated oak, at least an inch thick. Never use plywood, treated lumber, or a board that has been oiled with anything but food oil. Season the plank by rubbing with oil and heating it empty; soaking the board first is modern grilling practice rather than anything the recipe asks for.
- Boning the shad"with backbone removed" understates the work. Shad carries several rows of fine floating intermuscular bones that ordinary filleting does not take out. Ask a fishmonger to bone it, or plank it split and bone-in and eat it carefully.
- Onion juice and cayenneBoth appear in the ingredient list but never in the method. Work the onion juice and a few grains of cayenne into the four tablespoons of softened butter before spreading it on the fish.
- The finishCatsup in 1907 was generally thinner and sharper than the modern bottle, closer to a spiced tomato sauce. The white wine is the easier option now, spooned over hot with the parsley.
- The garnishThe piped potato is duchesse-like in effect, though the recipe specifies only highly seasoned hot mashed potato; stiffening it with egg yolk and butter will help it hold its shape when piped around the edge of the plank.
- YieldThe recipe gives none; a whole shad would serve roughly four to six as a main course, served on the plank.
Planking fish is a North American method, generally traced to Native practice along the Atlantic and Great Lakes of fixing split fish to a board propped before an open fire; colonists took it up and by the late nineteenth century it had become a restaurant showpiece, the plank carried to the table with piped potato around the rim. Shad was one of the standard fish for it, alongside Great Lakes whitefish. The American shad runs up East Coast rivers in spring in enormous numbers, and shad planking was a fixture of Chesapeake and Delaware river shad bakes, with the roe often fetching more than the flesh. Lowney's Cook Book (1907), written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company of Boston, is best remembered for its chocolate work, but like other house cookbooks of the era it aimed to cover an entire domestic repertoire, and its fish chapter reflects what a Boston household could buy in season. Shad runs have since declined sharply across much of that range, and the fish is no longer the cheap spring staple this recipe assumes.