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Planked Steak with Oysters
Have an extra sirloin neatly trimmed; put it on the broiler; oroil five minutes on one side; turn and broil five minutes on the other side. Make the planking board very hot while the steak is oroiling. Put the steak on; garnish the board quickly with mashed potatoes and put it under the broiler. Turn the steak once. Dust with salt and pepper and rub with butter. Cover the top with oroiled oysters, then run it again under the broiler for a few minutes. Serve very hot.
An extra-thick sirloin, seared under the broiler and finished on a hot hardwood plank with a border of piped potato and a topping of oysters. The typography has suffered: every "oroil" and "oroiling" in the original is broil and broiling.
- The hinge is the plankAn untreated hardwood plank (oak, or the sold-for-the-purpose planking boards of the period) needs to be heated right through before the meat touches it; the recipe says only "make the planking board very hot," and later practice usually adds a light oiling of the surface. Give it a spell in a hot oven and oil it again just before the steak goes on. Never use pine, plywood, or anything glued or finished.
- "An extra sirloin"Most likely a call for a thick, choice cut rather than a defined butcher's grade; the recipe gives no thickness. A steak of ordinary thickness will be well past done by the end of this sequence, which puts it under the broiler three separate times.
- Broiler distanceA coal or gas broiler of the period ran hot and close. Set a modern rack about 4 inches from the element on high, and take the first ten minutes as a guide rather than a rule: pull the steak at 120-125F internal for rare, since it still has two more trips under the heat.
- The potato borderA border of mashed potato around the edge of the plank is the usual reading of "garnish the board quickly with mashed potatoes"; piping it through a star tube is the later refinement. It needs to be stiff enough to hold its shape and dry enough to brown, so keep the milk and butter modest.
- Oysters want almost no timeShucked oysters broiled more than two or three minutes shrink and turn rubbery. They should just curl at the edges and their liquor should bubble. "A few minutes" at the end is for browning the potato as much as for the oysters.
- Season at the right momentThe salt, pepper and butter go on after the searing, as written; the butter will melt into the meat and the plank while the top is being built.
- Yield and serviceA thick sirloin of about 3 lb will serve four. The plank goes to the table on an underliner, and it will be dangerously hot, so warn people before it lands.
Planking was a restaurant trick that migrated into the ambitious home kitchen around the turn of the century, and it left its mark on the language: "planked shad" and "planked steak" were long-standing fixtures of American cookery, and the fitted plank with a grooved rim to catch juices was a familiar piece of kitchen equipment. The technique is generally traced to fish cookery on wooden boards before an open fire, and the plank persisted less for the flavor of the wood than for the theater of the arrival: a sizzling board, a piped potato border, and the meat framed like a portrait. Oysters on beef marks the recipe as thoroughly American and thoroughly of its moment, when Atlantic oysters were still cheap enough to be used as a garnish rather than the main event; a similar impulse is often said to lie behind carpetbag steak, whose origin is disputed, and behind the oyster-stuffed roasts of nineteenth-century holiday tables.