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Planked Haddock
Skin and bone a haddock, leaving meat in two fillets. Remove to buttered plank, sprinkle with salt and pepper, brush over with melted butter and bake thirty minutes. Garnish with mashed potatoes, outlining the original shape of the fish, making as prominent as possible head, tail, and fins. Bake until potatoes are well browned, when fish should be thoroughly cooked. Finish garnishing with parsley and slices of lemon sprinkled with finely chopped parsley.
A planked fish is baked and served on the same board, and the whole point is presentation: the potato border is piped back into the outline of the fish that was just filleted. Two things need adjusting — the plank itself and the baking time.
- The plankUse a thick, untreated board (oak or maple; cedar, a softwood, for a smokier note), at least an inch thick, oiled and heated in the oven before the fish goes on. Never use plywood, glued board, or anything varnished or resin-sealed. A new plank is usually seasoned by rubbing with oil and heating it empty, or it may warp and split in use.
- Oven heatFarmer gives no temperature. Plank cookery is generally taken to want a hot oven, so something in the region of 400 to 425F. The plank absorbs a good deal of heat, so preheat it along with the oven.
- Thirty minutes is far too longThirty minutes is likely longer than needed -- Skinned haddock fillets from a 3-4 lb fish run roughly half an inch to an inch thick and are usually done in 10 to 15 minutes at 400F, when the flesh turns opaque and flakes at the thickest point. Note that the recipe adds the potato only after this half hour and then bakes again until the potato browns, so the fish is in the oven longer still. Bake the fish only until barely set, pipe on the potato, then finish under the broiler for 3-5 minutes so the potato colours without overcooking the fish.
- Potato borderUse a stiff duchesse-style mash — potato dried over heat, then beaten with butter and an egg yolk — or it will slump instead of holding the fins and tail. Pipe with a star tube; a spoon will not give the ridges that brown.
- ButteringButter the hot plank generously and re-brush the fish partway through. Haddock is lean and dries quickly on a dry board.
- ServingTwo fillets from one haddock serve three to four. The plank goes to the table on a folded napkin or a wooden trivet; it will be hot enough to scorch a cloth.
- Bones and pin bonesRun a finger along the fillet and pull any pin bones with tweezers before baking; the recipe's 'skin and bone' leaves the detail to the cook.
Plank cookery came into American kitchens from shore and river cooking, where fish was nailed or propped on a board beside a fire — a technique generally traced to Native practice along the Atlantic coast and the Great Lakes, and adopted for planked shad and whitefish in the nineteenth century. By the time Fannie Farmer was writing at the Boston Cooking School, the plank had moved indoors: hotels and chophouses of the 1890s and 1900s made a specialty of planked steaks and fish brought sizzling to the table with a piped potato border, and manufacturers sold ready-cut oak service planks with a groove to catch the juices. Haddock was the sensible New England choice for it — cheap, abundant on Georges Bank and the inshore grounds, and firm enough to hold together in two large fillets. The instruction to rebuild the fish's head, tail and fins in mashed potato belongs squarely to that era's taste for the ornamented, architectural dish, when a cook's skill was judged as much by the piping bag as by the seasoning.