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Baked Mackerel
Split fish, clean, and remove head and tail. Put in buttered dripping-pan, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and dot over with butter (allowing one tablespoon to a mediumsized fish), and pour over two-thirds cup milk. Bake twentyfive minutes in hot oven. Planked Shad or Whitefish Clean and split a three-pound shad. Put skin side down on a buttered oak plank one inch thick, and a little longer and wider than the fish, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and brush over with melted butter. Bake twenty-five minutes in hot oven. Remove from oven, spread with butter, and garnish with parsley and lemon. The fish should be sent to the table on plank. Planked Shad is well cooked in a gas range having the flame over the fish.
The Planked Whitefish of the Great Lakes has gained much favor,
Two recipes have run together here: baked split mackerel, and the planked shad or whitefish that follows it. Both depend on a very hot oven and a short time, which is the whole point of the method.
- "Hot oven"Roughly 400-425F in modern terms. The book gives only descriptive oven terms (slow, moderate, hot, quick); the numbers are a later approximation, not a scale printed in the text.
- Dripping-panA shallow rimmed roasting or sheet pan, not a covered casserole. The fish should sit in a thin film of milk and butter that concentrates, not steam in a deep dish.
- "Split fish"Opened flat, backbone in or out; the recipe does not say which way up. The butter allowance of one tablespoon is for whatever the book counted as a "medium-sized fish", which it does not define by weight.
- TimingTwenty-five minutes is generous by current practice for a split mackerel; a butterflied fillet is done in 12 to 18 minutes at 425F. Check at 12 minutes and pull it when the thickest part flakes and reads about 145F.
- The milkTwo-thirds cup is enough to keep the flesh moist and to brown into a savory glaze at the edges. Do not baste with it repeatedly or it will scorch on the pan bottom before the fish is done.
- Mackerel itselfAn oily, strongly flavored fish that must be genuinely fresh; if it smells of anything but sea, do not bake it. Lemon or a sharp mustard butter suits it, though this recipe specifies no accompaniment.
- The plankUntreated oak or hickory, never plywood, and never a board that has met varnish, glue or dish soap. The recipe asks only that the one-inch plank be buttered; oiling and pre-heating the board are later practice and may reduce warping.
- Shad bonesShad is famously bony. Planking cooks the fish without turning it, so the flesh is not broken up in handling; boned shad fillets are sold in season and save the trouble. Wild shad runs are restricted or closed in some waters, so check what your fishmonger is actually selling.
- YieldOne medium mackerel serves one to two; a three-pound shad serves three to four.
Planking is generally traced to Native fishing practice along the Atlantic coast and the Great Lakes, where split fish was propped on a board before an open fire; nineteenth-century American cooks moved it indoors to the range and kept the board as both cooking surface and serving dish, which is why the recipe insists the fish "be sent to the table on plank." Shad, an anadromous river herring, was one of the great cheap spring foods of the eastern seaboard, its annual run a fixed point in the calendar of markets from the Chesapeake to the Connecticut, and the recipe mentions gas ranges "having the flame over the fish." The note that Great Lakes planked whitefish "has gained much favor" is a piece of contemporary reporting, passing on a regional fashion to home cooks.