Planked Shad
Clean and split a three-pound shad. Heat the plank very hot; lay the fish upon it, skin side down. Brush the flesh carefully over with olive oil or butter; then sprinkle with salt and pepper. Bake for thirty minutes in a hot oven. It may be cooked in a gas range, having the flame over the fish. When cooked pour over the fish two tablespoons of melted butter and the juice of one lemon. Garnish with parsley, quarters of lemon, and mashed potatoes. Shape the potatoes by means of a forcing bag and star tube; brush over with beaten yolk of egg; then brown in the oven. the plank on a serving dish and serve.
A straightforward planked fish, though the plank itself is the part most modern cooks get wrong. The original's last sentence is garbled in the printing — it means to set the plank on a serving dish and bring it to table.
- The plankUse an untreated hardwood board — oak, hickory or maple, an inch thick — never plywood, treated lumber or anything glued. Season it first by rubbing with oil and heating it empty in the oven; the board must be hot before the fish touches it, or the skin sticks.
- "A hot oven"In period usage this is generally reckoned at roughly 400-450F. The heat is what crisps the skin against the board and sets the flesh before it dries.
- "Flame over the fish"This is broiling in a gas range of the period, with the burner above. A modern broiler does the same job, but the plank sits closer to the element and can scorch; keep it 6 inches down and watch it.
- Thirty minutes is too longThirty minutes is likely long -- a split three-pound shad is a thin, flat piece of fish. At around 425F it should be done in 18-25 minutes, the flesh opaque and just flaking; standard guidance is 145F at the thickest point. Held the full half hour it can dry out and the oil-rich flesh turn woolly.
- The bonesShad carries notorious rows of fine floating intermuscular bones that are very hard to remove after cooking. Buy it boned by a fishmonger, or accept that you will be eating around them.
- Sourcing shadAmerican shad runs have declined sharply since this book was written and several Atlantic states have closed or restricted the fishery, so it is seasonal and regional at best. Bluefish, mackerel or a side of salmon plank the same way, with the same timing.
- The potato garnishEssentially duchesse potato: mashed or riced potato piped through a star tube and glazed with egg yolk before browning. Note that the recipe brushes the yolk on rather than specifying it as a binder, and does not say at what point the potatoes go into the oven.
- YieldA three-pound whole shad feeds three, perhaps four with the potatoes.
Planking fish over or against hot wood is a technique generally traced to Native cooks along the Atlantic seaboard, from whom the colonists are often said to have taken it, and shad — which ran up the Delaware, Susquehanna and Hudson in enormous spring shoals — was its natural subject. The fish was cheap, oily enough to survive dry heat, and so abundant that nineteenth-century Philadelphia and Baltimore markets handled it in quantity each spring. Communal shad plankings became fixtures of the spring calendar in the mid-Atlantic and Virginia, and the political shad planking at Wakefield, held annually since 1949, is the best-known event to carry the name. That a cookery school book treats it as an ordinary fish-course entry, dressed up with piped duchesse potatoes and lemon quarters, shows the dish making the move from riverbank event to dining-room service — and it dates the book, since shad has since become scarce and expensive where it was once the poor man's spring fish.