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September 8
Menu: Planked Smelts; Baked Lamb Chops; Breaded Beets; Riced Potatoes; Avocado Pear Salad; a; Apricot Cream; Coffee Planked Smelts-Crisco a plank quite generously, and place upon it smelts that have been split, cleaned, and seasoned, and squeeze liberal amount of lemon juice over them. Arrange in form of large fish shape, and garnish with potato roses put on with pastry tube and sprinkle with tiny bits of Crisco and finely chopped parsley. Place plank in oven and cook until potatoes are slightly browned. Garnish before taking to table with sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, dressed in vinegar, between potato roses..
A plank dinner from Crisco's promotional calendar, written in the shorthand of a period menu — the stray words at either end are the neighboring entries, not part of the dish. "Crisco" is used here as a verb, meaning to grease.
- The plankThis calls for a hardwood cooking plank; oak and hickory were the usual choices, generally around an inch thick, oiled and heated gradually before first use. An unseasoned board or a thin barbecue smoking plank will scorch or warp under direct oven heat. A heavy oiled baking sheet gives much the same result minus the presentation.
- Oven heatNo temperature or oven term is given anywhere in the entry. A hot oven, in the region of 450F, suits the dish: the fish are small and need to cook through in roughly the time it takes the piped potato to color, perhaps 10 to 12 minutes.
- SmeltsRainbow smelt, small whole fish of roughly 5 to 8 inches, usually sold frozen and often already cleaned. Split and boned they cook in minutes; the flesh should be opaque and lift from the fine bones. Overcooked they dry out badly, so judge by the fish rather than the potatoes if the two disagree.
- Potato rosesDuchesse potatoes — riced potato beaten with egg yolk and a little fat — piped through a star tube. Plain mashed potato will slump in the oven; the yolk is what holds the shape and browns the ridges.
- "Tiny bits of Crisco"Dots of shortening scattered over the piped potato, which melt and encourage browning. Butter does the job better if you are not committed to the sponsor.
- The garnish goes on lastSliced tomato and cucumber dressed in vinegar are added after the plank leaves the oven, tucked between the potato roses. Put them in the oven and you get warm limp salad and a watery plank.
- YieldUnstated. Allow 4 to 6 cleaned smelts per person; a plank large enough to lay the fish out in the suggested outline will serve about four as a course.
Planked cooking was a restaurant flourish that migrated into ambitious home kitchens between about 1890 and 1920: fish or steak baked on a hardwood board, ringed with piped potato, and carried to the table on the board itself so that the serving dish was also the cooking vessel. It descends, at least by tradition, from shad and salmon roasted on boards before an open fire, and the oven version kept the name and the theatricality after the fire was gone. Smelts were an obvious candidate on both coasts, and small enough to arrange decoratively. Its appearance in The Story of Crisco is no accident: the book pairs a year of menus with the then-new hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and a dish requiring greased planks, dotted potato and general lavishness gave Procter and Gamble several occasions to name the product in a single paragraph, even pressing it into service as a verb.