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Chicken
2 spring chickens 1/2 pound mushrooms 1 glass guava jelly 1 cup boiled rice Stew the mushrooms; put the chicken either in the oven or under the broiler, bone side to the hottest part of the fire. Heat the plank; put the chicken on, bone side down; dust with salt and pepper and broil on the board under the gas for half an hour; garnish with the rice; pour over the mushrooms. Place at the corners small bread patties, holding the guava jelly.
A planked broil from the era when a seasoned hardwood board was standard equipment for a gas broiler. The recipe assumes you know how to split and flatten a bird, so the useful work here is in the vessels, the vanished measures and the timing.
- The plankA seasoned hardwood board, usually oak, oiled and heated empty before the meat goes on. It is a serving-and-cooking surface: the chicken finishes on it and goes to table on it. A plank will char and can smoulder under a broiler element, so it wants watching and a well-oiled surface; a heavy cast-iron pan gives a similar searing effect without the scent of the wood.
- Spring chickensYoung birds of roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb dressed, split down the back and flattened. Two of them serve four. Modern supermarket broiler-fryers run 3 1/2 to 4 lb and will need longer and a lower heat; two spatchcocked Cornish hens are closer to what was intended.
- "1 glass guava jelly"A jelly glass, the small tapered tumbler jelly was set in, holding roughly 6 to 8 oz. Any guava paste or jelly works; it is used cold as a sweet-tart counterpoint, not cooked.
- Bone side to the fireThe rib side takes the first, fiercest heat and the skin side is spared until the finish, so the skin does not render and burn before the thigh is done. The recipe itself never mentions turning the bird.
- Half an hour under the gasPlausible for a genuine 2 lb spring chicken under a hot broiler, but go by temperature rather than the clock: 165F at the thickest part of the thigh. A larger modern bird broiled a full thirty minutes will be scorched outside and underdone at the joint.
- Stewed mushroomsPeriod shorthand for mushrooms cooked gently in butter with a little stock or cream until they give up their liquor and it thickens, ten to fifteen minutes. Half a pound is about 8 oz of button or cremini, sliced.
- Bread pattiesThe recipe specifies bread rather than pastry: small rounds of stale bread hollowed into cups and fried or toasted until crisp, then filled with the jelly. They can be made hours ahead and re-crisped.
- Assembly and yieldProbably four, on the evidence of the four corner garnishes, though the recipe gives no yield. Everything but the chicken should be ready before the bird comes off the heat, since the rice and mushrooms are added at the last moment.
Planking is an American restaurant technique that moved into the home kitchen around the turn of the twentieth century, when gas broilers made a controlled top heat available to anyone with a range. Planked shad and planked steak came first and are generally traced to open-fire cooking on the eastern seaboard; by the 1900s and 1910s the hardwood plank was sold as a piece of fashionable equipment, and cookbooks of the period plank chicken, fish and chops. The guava jelly may be the tell of the same fashion, a faintly exotic sweet accent to broiled poultry where a cook of an earlier generation would have reached for currant jelly. The bread cases at the corners are pure presentation logic, the plank being a platter as much as a pan.