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Planked Perch, Italienne
Scale, cut off fins, and neatly wipe six fresh, medium perch. Season them all around with teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Lightly roll them in flour. Heat two tablespoons of oil in frying pan, arrange the perch in the pan and briskly fry for two minutes on each side. Lightly oil the top of a planed oak board, as for shad, and place perch on top.
Prepare a potato brioche preparation, place it in a pastry bag with a fancy tube at the bottom, then press down the potatoes around the edges of the plank. Pour Italienne sauce over the fish. Sprinkle a tablespoon of Parmesan cheese over, then set in the oven fifteen minutes. Remove and serve.
A Great Lakes fish given the Delmonico plank treatment. Two components are assumed rather than explained here, and the oven temperature is never stated at all.
- The plankA "planed oak board" means plain untreated hardwood, cut a little larger than the fish laid side by side; an inch or so thick is typical. Never use reclaimed, painted, glued or pressure-treated lumber; a food-safe untreated oak or maple plank sold for grilling is the direct equivalent. Oil the surface, as the recipe directs, so the fish releases.
- Oven heatThe original gives none. Fifteen minutes with a cheese gratin and piped potato wants a hot oven, around 425F, enough to colour the potato border and glaze the sauce without drying fish that has already been seared.
- Potato brioche preparationEffectively a duchesse-type mixture: dry riced potato beaten with egg yolk and butter, stiff enough to hold a star-tube pattern. It must be firm and warm when piped, or the border slumps into the sauce.
- Italienne sauceA brown sauce, not a tomato one. Classically demi-glace with a duxelles of finely chopped mushroom and shallot, a little tomato, and chopped fines herbes finished off the heat. About a cup is plenty for six perch; more and it floods the potato wall.
- The perch themselves"Medium" perch here means whole pan fish of 6-8 oz, cooked on the bone. Fillets are often easier to find; if you use them, cut the initial fry to about a minute a side and the oven time to eight or ten minutes.
- Frying then bakingThe two-minute sear per side is for colour and to set the flour, not to cook through. Do it in oil hot enough to sizzle immediately, and move the fish to the plank with a wide spatula while still firm, or they break apart.
- FinishingA single tablespoon of Parmesan over six fish is a light dusting rather than a cheese crust. If it has not browned by the end, thirty seconds under the broiler will do it.
- YieldSix whole perch serves three to six depending on the rest of the menu; the plank goes to the table as the centrepiece and the fish are served from it.
Planking is an American technique before it is an Italian one: shad nailed or laid on a hardwood board and set before an open fire was long a ritual on several eastern rivers, and by the late nineteenth century restaurant kitchens had moved it into the oven, where the board became a serving dish as much as a cooking surface. The framing of piped duchesse potato around the edge is pure hotel-dining presentation of the 1890s and 1900s, designed to hold the sauce and to arrive at the table looking built rather than plated. "Italienne" refers to the sauce alone, a standard brown sauce of the French repertoire made with a mushroom-and-herb duxelles — the name is often said to come from that duxelles, though the etymology is not settled — which is why a Great Lakes perch can be labelled Italian without a tomato in sight. The recipe's cross-reference to shad and its assumption that the cook already knows both the potato piping and the sauce mark it as the work of a professional chef writing for other professionals, a habit plausibly suggesting the kind of Delmonico-trained authors whose collections filled American cookbook shelves in this period.