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Planked Salisbury Steak
1 pound lean beef Salt and pepper 1 teaspoon onion juice Mashed potatoes 3 baked bananas 1 cup cream sauce 1/2 cup grated horseradish Chop the meat very fine; season with salt, pepper and onion juice; make it into three cakes. Put the cakes on a hot plank and then under the broiler. It is wise to turn a Salisbury steak once during the cooking. When done garnish the plank with mashed potatoes; put it back until brown. Have ready a baked banana for each cake. Make a cream sauce; add to it half a cup of grated horseradish; fill this around the board; put the baked bananas on top and serve.
A hotel-style dish built for a wooden serving plank: three chopped beef cakes, a piped potato border, baked bananas, and horseradish cream. The plank is the whole point, and it is also the part most likely to go wrong.
- The plankUse a thick untreated hardwood plank (oak, hickory or maple), never softwood or anything glued or finished. Season it first by rubbing with oil and heating it slowly in a 300F oven, and keep the exposed wood covered with potato or oiled well, or it will scorch and smoke under the broiler.
- Broiler distanceSet the plank 5-6 inches below the element rather than directly beneath it. Closer, and the wood chars before the centers of the cakes are done.
- Chopping the meat"Chop the meat very fine" means hand-chopped with a knife or run through a grinder at home; the texture is coarser and juicier than supermarket ground beef. The recipe calls for lean beef, so ground chuck or sirloin at about 85/15 stands in well; the cakes should be loosely packed, not compressed.
- DonenessBecause the beef is minced, take the patties to 160F internal. Cakes of this size, roughly 5 oz each and an inch thick, run 4-5 minutes per side under a hot broiler.
- Onion juiceAn old-fashioned seasoning: grate a peeled onion on a fine grater and use the liquid that collects, or press grated onion in a sieve. A teaspoon is about a quarter of a small onion. Grated onion pulp works but wets the mixture.
- Cream sauceA plain white sauce -- 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk or thin cream, cooked out for a few minutes and seasoned. Stir the horseradish in off the heat; boiling it flattens the sharpness.
- HorseradishHalf a cup of freshly grated root is assertive. Bottled prepared horseradish is milder and already vinegared, so start with a third of a cup and drain it first, or the sauce will thin and curdle-look.
- Baked bananasFirm, barely ripe bananas, peeled, laid in a buttered dish with a little butter and lemon, baked at 375F for 15-20 minutes until tender. They collapse quickly if overripe.
- YieldThree cakes, so three servings. The recipe does not quantify the potatoes; allow enough -- a couple of pounds, mashed stiff enough to hold a piped edge -- to border the plank.
Salisbury steak takes its name from Dr. James H. Salisbury, an American physician who in the later nineteenth century promoted finely minced lean beef as a therapeutic food, and the dish kept a faint air of the invalid tray long after it became restaurant fare. Planking, generally traced to Native American methods of cooking fish on a board before an open fire and taken up enthusiastically by American hotels and chophouses, gave a kitchen a way to send meat, potato border and garnish to the table on one hot piece of wood -- and to charge for the theater of it. The combination here, with baked bananas and horseradish cream, belongs to an era when planked steaks and "planked shad" appeared on club menus and fruit garnishes on meat plates were considered a mark of refinement. Mrs. Fryer's loose-leaf format was sold so that pages could be added or replaced.