Home › A Calendar of Dinners › February 6
February 6
Menu: Rose and White Radishes with Butter; Cream of Mutton Soup; Baked Bluefish, Breslin Style; Planked Chicken; Jerusalem Artichokes Saute; Apple and Cress Salad; Snow Pudding with Chocolate Sauce; Coffee Planked Chicken-Cream together 1/4 cup Crisco, 1 teaspoon minced onion, 14 tablespoon each of minced red pepper, green pepper, and parsley, 1½ clove minced garlic, and 1 teaspoon lemon juice. oven. Split 1 young chicken as for broiling, place in pan, sprinkle with salt and pepper, dot over with Crisco, and bake until nearly done in a quick Then Crisco plank, arrange upon it border made from 2 cups of hot mashed potatoes to which have been added seasoning and beaten yolks of 3 eggs. This is put on with a pastry tube and may be made as fanciful as desired, with rosettes and pyramids. Brush over with beaten egg diluted slightly with water, and place chicken in center. Peel and saute 8 large mushroom caps, place on chicken (which has been spread with prepared butter), place in very hot oven to brown potatoes and finish cooking chicken. Serve on plank at once.
A plank dinner from the Crisco era: half a broiler, a piped potato border, and a seasoned fat rubbed over the bird at the end. The order of work matters more than any measurement here.
- The "prepared butter"The first list — Crisco creamed with minced onion, sweet peppers, parsley, garlic and lemon juice — is a compound fat, not part of the chicken seasoning. It is spread on the bird just before the final blast of heat, so the aromatics do not scorch.
- Oven temperaturesA "quick" oven is usually read as roughly 400-425F for the first bake; the "very hot" finish would be higher again, around 450-500F, hot enough to color the potato piping in a few minutes. Watch it rather than timing it, since egg-enriched potato browns fast.
- DonenessBake the split chicken to about 155F in the thigh in the first stage, then let the high-heat finish carry it to 165F. The recipe gives neither weight nor time; a 2½-3 lb broiler split in half will likely need something in the region of 25-35 minutes for the first bake.
- The plankPlanks for this sort of service were commonly oak or hickory and were greased before use (here, with Crisco); they were a familiar fixture of hotel and club cookery in this period. An untreated hardwood board or a heavy oval metal platter will do; do not use a modern laminated or glued cutting board in the oven.
- Piping the potatoesTwo cups of mashed potato with three egg yolks is a duchesse mixture. It must be stiff and fairly dry to hold a rosette — drain the potatoes well and add no milk, or the border slumps on the plank.
- MushroomsPeeling caps was routine when mushrooms came field-picked and gritty; today wiping is enough. Saute them until they have given up their water, or they will weep onto the potatoes.
- Ambiguous quantitiesThe pepper-and-parsley measure is printed as "14 tablespoon each" and the garlic as "1½ clove", both plainly corrupt. A quarter tablespoon (about ¾ teaspoon) each of the minced vegetables and a clove or so of garlic suit a quarter cup of fat.
- YieldOne split broiler on a plank serves two generously, or three with the potatoes and mushrooms counted as the vegetable. Serve directly from the wood, as directed — the point of the dish is that it arrives sizzling.
Planked meats and fish were a hallmark of American hotel and club cookery from the 1880s through the 1920s: food finished on a hardwood board under fierce heat, ringed with piped potato, and carried to the table on the same plank. The technique is generally traced to Great Lakes planked whitefish, itself borrowed from indigenous practice of cooking fish lashed to wood by a fire, and it moved from shore dinners into city restaurants as a piece of tableside theater. Its appearance in The Story of Crisco is deliberate: Procter & Gamble published the book in 1913 to persuade cooks that its new hydrogenated vegetable shortening could do everything butter and lard did, so the calendar of dinners leans on showy, buttery-seeming dishes in which Crisco quietly stands in for the more familiar fats.