Planked Chops
Broil some thick chops on one side and arrange them cooked side down, overlapping each other on the hot plank. Season with salt, pepper and butter. Cook for twenty minutes, basting frequently. Decorate with a border of mashed potatoes pressed through a bag and a star tube. Fill in with hot vegetables. Serve at once with brown sauce.
A plank dinner is a one-surface meal: meat, piped potato border and vegetables all finished and served on the same heated board. The recipe assumes you own a seasoned hardwood plank and know how to treat it, which is where most of the modern difficulty lies.
- The plank itselfUse a thick, untreated hardwood board — oak, hickory or maple — an inch or more deep, never softwood or anything glued or varnished. Season it before first use by rubbing it well with oil and heating it slowly in a 250F oven for an hour or two, and oil the surface again each time it goes under heat, or the wood scorches and the meat sticks.
- Heat the plank emptyThe instruction to arrange the chops "on the hot plank" is the hinge. A cold board draws heat out of the seared meat and steams it; put the oiled plank in the oven while you broil so it is thoroughly hot when the chops go down.
- Which chopsMrs. Fryer does not specify. Lamb loin or rib chops, or thick pork chops cut 1 to 1½ inches, suit the method. Thin supermarket chops will be dry long before twenty minutes are up.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given, and the recipe does not say whether the twenty minutes are under the broiler or in the oven. Broil the first side under high heat until well browned; if you finish in the oven, a hot one, roughly 425 to 450F, works. Cook to an internal 145F for lamb or pork and rest a few minutes before serving.
- Twenty minutes is a maximum, not a ruleTwenty minutes at high heat suits a very thick chop that has only been seared on one side. Check with a thermometer at fifteen.
- The potato border"Pressed through a bag and a star tube" is a piping bag and star tip. The potatoes must be stiff — dry them out over low heat and use a little egg yolk — or the border slumps. Pipe it around the rim of the wood, not touching the meat, and give it a few minutes under the broiler to brown.
- Order of assemblyHave the vegetables and brown sauce finished and hot before the chops go on the plank. Piping and filling happen in the last two or three minutes, which is why the recipe insists on serving at once.
- ServingSet the plank on a wooden trencher or folded cloth on a metal tray; it will be hot enough to mark a table. No yield is given: the recipe serves as many as the plank will hold chops.
Plank cookery in American cookbooks descends from an older method of propping fish on a board before an open fire, and is generally traced to shad cooked that way along the Atlantic coast. By the time this book was compiled the plank had moved indoors and become a restaurant flourish: a heated oak board, a browned piped potato border, and a ring of glazed vegetables, sold to diners as a whole dinner arriving at once and still sizzling. Home cooks seem to have bought planks with metal trays to match, and books of the era carried a whole run of planked steaks, chops, fish and chicken built on the same template — sear, transfer to the hot board, decorate with duchesse potatoes, fill in with whatever vegetables are on hand. The recipe's brevity may be a sign of how familiar the method was: Mrs. Fryer appears to assume her reader already knows how to season a plank and fill a pastry bag, and spends her words only on the arrangement.