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Planked Pompano, Breslin
Procure two very fresh pompanos one and a half pounds each. Neatly trim and wipe, make a few incisions on both sides of the skin of each, evenly season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon paprika and half teaspoon curry powder. Completely oil the surface of an oak plank (board), lay the fish one beside another on the plank, baste with a little melted butter, set in the oven to bake for twenty minutes and remove to a table.
Have a brioche potato preparation. Place the potatoes in a pastry bag with a dentilated tube at the bottom, and by carefully pressing it down make a nice border around the edges of the plank. Finely slice ten medium-sized, peeled and thoroughly cleaned fresh mushrooms, one green pepper and four sound shallots, and lightly brown these articles in a frying pan with a tablespoon sweet oil for five minutes, then place them on top of the pompanos. Neatly arrange two finely sliced, peeled raw red tomatoes around the fish, sprinkle over half teaspoon salt, three saltspoons pepper, half teaspoon finely chopped parsley, one tablespoon fresh bread crumbs and the juice of half a lemon. Set in the oven to bake for twenty-five minutes, remove and serve.
A hotel-style presentation dish: the plank is both cooking vessel and serving platter, which dictates most of the technique. Read the timings with suspicion before you start.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given anywhere in the recipe. Bake at 400F; a plank needs steady heat rather than a fierce one, or the exposed potato border scorches before the fish is done.
- The plank itselfUse untreated, kiln-dried oak with no glue, finish or preservative, at least three-quarters of an inch thick. Soak it in water for an hour and oil it well; a dry thin board can char and crack, and a treated board will taint the fish.
- Total baking timeTwenty minutes plus a further twenty-five is far too long for two one-and-a-half-pound pompanos. Bake the fish about 15 minutes, until it is just opaque at the bone, then pipe the potato, add the vegetables and return it only long enough to brown the border and heat the topping through, roughly 8 to 10 minutes.
- Brioche potato preparationThis is the enriched piped potato of the period, essentially duchesse: hot riced potato beaten with butter, egg yolk and a little cream, seasoned, stiff enough to hold a shape. A "dentilated tube" is a star tip.
- Saltspoon and sweet oilA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three of them is about three-quarters of a teaspoon of pepper. "Sweet oil" means mild olive oil.
- PompanoFlorida pompano is still sold whole and is worth seeking out, but supply is seasonal and it is not cheap. Whole black bass, small snapper or trout of the same weight plank equally well; keep each fish under about a pound and a half so it cooks in the time given above.
- Shallots"Sound" here simply means unblemished. Four is probably intended as four whole bulbs; modern shallots are often larger, so two good ones may be closer to the intent.
- YieldTwo fish of this size serve four as a main course. The plank goes to the table as it is, set on a wooden trivet or a folded cloth so it does not mark the table.
The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and it follows the practice of naming set-piece dishes after the hotels and restaurants that served them; "Breslin" almost certainly points to the Hotel Breslin at Broadway and 29th Street, which opened in the first decade of the twentieth century. Planking is one of the few genuinely American techniques in a book otherwise devoted to French method, and it is generally traced to Native cooking of the Great Lakes and Atlantic coast, where fish was fixed to a slab of hardwood and set beside a fire; by 1900 it had been absorbed into hotel dining rooms as planked shad, planked whitefish and planked steak, all valued because the hot board arrived at the table still sizzling. Pompano was the luxury choice, shipped north on ice from Florida and the Gulf, and the piped potato border here is doing exactly what a silver platter's garnish did elsewhere: sealing the presentation and hiding the joins.