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Poultry and Game (Butter and bake in a hot oven)
butter, and bake in a hot oven until nearly cooked. Butter plank, arrange a border of Duchess Potatoes (see p. 312) close to edge of plank, and remove chicken to plank. Clean, peel, and sauté mushroom caps, place on chicken, spread over prepared butter, and put in a very hot oven to brown. potatoes and finish cooking chicken. Serve on the plank.
This is the tail end of a planked chicken recipe — the page begins mid-sentence, so the bird's splitting, seasoning and initial roasting are on the preceding page. What survives here is the plank assembly, which is the part that needs translating.
- The plankA cooking plank is a thick slab of hardwood (oak and hickory were common choices), greased and warmed before use; the recipe here says simply to butter it. It goes into the oven and then to the table as the serving dish. A thick untreated hardwood board, oiled and warmed gradually, is the equivalent; a cast-iron platter works if you have no plank.
- Oven temperaturesThe book gives no thermometer figures for these terms; by later convention a "hot oven" is taken as roughly 400–425°F and a "very hot oven" as roughly 450–475°F. The very hot stage both browns the top and, per the recipe's own closing line, finishes cooking the chicken.
- "Prepared butter"This points back to a butter mixed earlier in the recipe, on the page missing here; Farmer's planked dishes often call for maître d'hôtel butter (butter worked with lemon juice, chopped parsley, salt and cayenne), but what was specified here cannot be recovered. Make it soft enough to spread but not melted.
- Duchess potatoesRiced potato beaten with butter and egg yolk (some versions add cream), piped or shaped into a border. It must be stiff enough to hold its shape or the border slumps into the pan juices during the browning stage.
- Order of workThe garbled final sentence should read that the very hot oven browns the potatoes and finishes cooking the chicken. That is the point of the two-stage method: the bird comes off the roasting pan underdone, then finishes on the plank while the border colors.
- DonenessTake the chicken to 165°F at the thickest part of the thigh. Because the plank stage is short and very hot, judge the first roasting so the bird is within about 10 degrees of done before transferring.
- MushroomsSauté the caps gill-side up in butter over fairly high heat until they release and reabsorb their liquid. Crowding them steams them and they will weep onto the finished plank.
- YieldThe recipe as it survives gives no weight. As a rough guide, a split broiler of about 2½–3 lb will serve two on the plank, and a larger bird three if the potato border is generous.
Plank cookery was a restaurant flourish of the 1890s and 1900s that also appeared in household cookbooks of the period, Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book among them. Steak and shad were the classic candidates han American open-fire cooking, where fish was nailed to a board and set before the coals — but by the time the technique reached hotel dining rooms it had become a matter of presentation: the hot board, the piped potato border acting as a dam against the juices, the mushroom caps and glazed butter on top. Planked chicken belongs to the same era as the chafing dish and the individual ramekin, when a dish was expected to arrive at the table in the vessel it was finished in. The potato border is not decoration alone; on a plank with no rim, it helps keep the butter and juices from running onto the tablecloth.