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Planked Chicken
1/4 Cup Butter Substitute Red Pepper, Green Pepper, Parsley, 1/4 Tablespoon each, Finely Chopped Duchess Potatoes 8 Mushroom Caps 1 Teaspoon Finely Chopped Onion 1/2 Clove Garlic, Finely Chopped 1 Teaspoon Lemon Juice Cream the butter substitute, add pepper, parsley, onion, garlic, and lemon juice. Split a young chicken as for broiling, place in dripping-pan, sprinkle with salt and pepper, dot over with butter substitute, and bake in a hot oven until nearly cooked. Grease plank, arrange a border of Duchess Potatoes close to edge of plank, and remove chicken to plank. Clean, peel, and saute mushroom caps, place on chicken, spread over prepared butter substitute, and put in a very hot oven to brown potatoes and finish cooking chicken. Serve on the plank.
A two-stage roast: the bird starts in a dripping pan and finishes on an oiled hardwood plank ringed with piped potato. Most of what needs translating here is the fat, the oven heat, and the plank itself.
- Butter substituteThis is margarine or oleomargarine, called for by name in books written when butter was rationed, dear, or both. Butter works throughout with no other change.
- "1/4 tablespoon each"Three-quarters of a teaspoon of each of red pepper, green pepper and parsley, finely chopped. The peppers are sweet capsicums, not chilli or cayenne.
- Oven temperaturesA hot oven is conventionally taken as 400-425F for the first stage; a very hot oven as 450-475F for the browning. The recipe gives no time for the second stage, which it says is both to brown the potatoes and to finish cooking the chicken.
- The plankUse untreated kiln-dried hardwood, oak or hickory, an inch thick, never construction lumber or anything pressure-treated. The recipe asks only that the plank be greased.
- Duchess potatoesRiced potato bound with egg yolk, butter and cream, piped through a large star tube. Pipe the border while the potato is still warm, as the mixture stiffens as it cools and grows harder to force through the tube.
- Young chickenA broiler of about 2 to 2 1/2 lb, split as for broiling and flattened. The recipe gives no time for the first stage beyond "nearly cooked"; finish to 165F at the thickest part of the thigh.
- Compound butterThe creamed butter with pepper, parsley, onion, garlic and lemon goes on near the end, spread over the chicken and mushrooms just before the plank goes into the very hot oven.
- ServingSet the hot plank on a wooden trencher or folded cloth at table, as it will mark a finished surface.
Plank cooking came to American restaurants and then home kitchens in the later nineteenth century, and is usually traced to a Great Lakes and Northwestern practice of cooking fish on a slab of hardwood before an open fire; planked shad, whitefish and steak were fixtures of hotel menus, and cooking-school books of the period carried oven versions. The decorative border of Duchess potatoes suggests this version descends from that professional tradition, where the plank arrived at table as a finished composition rather than a piece of cooking equipment. The call for "butter substitute" places the book in the era when margarine was a common household fat.