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July 30
Menu: Clear Soup; cover; Planked Chicken; Potato Croquettes Asparagus Tips; Boiled Rice Pineapple Salad; Vanilla Ice Cream Strawberry Sauce; Coffee Planked Chicken-2 spring chickens, 1 cup boiled rice, 1/2 pound mushrooms, and 1 glass guava jelly. Stew mushrooms; put chicken either in oven or under broiler, bone side to hottest part of fire. Heat and Crisco a plank; put chicken on, bone side down; sprinkle with melted Crisco, dust with salt and pepper and broil on board under gas for 12 an hour. Garnish with rice; pour over mushrooms. Place at corners small bread patties, holding the guava jelly.
A plank-broiled split chicken from the Crisco calendar, where the shortening does duty as both basting fat and plank seasoning. The recipe assumes a gas broiler with an open flame and a cook who knows what a plank is; a few details need translating.
- The hinge: season the plank, and watch itUse a thick untreated hardwood plank (oak or hickory), heated and rubbed with fat so the surface chars rather than ignites. A thin, dry, or resinous board under a broiler flame is a fire risk. Keep the plank at least a few inches from the element and never leave it unattended.
- "12 an hour" is a typoThe original almost certainly reads 1/2 an hour. Half an hour of broiling suits a split spring chicken that has already had its start in the oven, but go by temperature, not the clock: 165F at the thickest part of the thigh.
- Spring chickensA spring chicken in this period was a young bird of roughly 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 lb, usually split and flattened for broiling. A modern equivalent is two small broilers or four split half-birds; a supermarket 4 lb roaster is too thick to broil this way. The recipe gives no number of servings.
- CriscoPlain vegetable shortening, then a novelty. Any neutral solid fat or clarified butter works for greasing the plank and basting; butter alone will brown too fast under a flame.
- "Bone side to the hottest part of the fire"Start the bird cut side toward the heat so the carcass shields the meat, then finish skin side up on the plank, as the recipe directs.
- Stewed mushroomsHalf a pound of mushrooms simmered in a little fat and stock until they release and reabsorb their liquid, roughly 10 to 15 minutes. They are the sauce, so keep them loose enough to pour.
- Bread pattiesSmall croustades: rounds of stale bread hollowed out and fried or toasted crisp, then filled. Guava jelly, sold in tumblers at the time, is still available in Latin and Caribbean groceries; a firm quince paste or red currant jelly gives the same sweet-tart counterpoint.
- ServingThe plank goes to the table, so set it on a wooden board or trivet. Bank the rice around the edge before the mushrooms go on, or the grains soak and collapse.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was Procter & Gamble's book-length argument for its new hydrogenated cottonseed shortening, and material of this kind — the "Calendar of Dinners" sort, often attributed to Marion Harris Neil, though the Crisco recipe material circulated under more than one title — exists to show the fat behaving in every course of a fashionable menu. Planked cookery was exactly the sort of dish that suited that argument: an American restaurant and hotel style, generally traced to Great Lakes plank-broiled whitefish and popularized in the late nineteenth century for steaks, shad and chicken, in which food is cooked and served on a seasoned hardwood board. It needed a fat that would not burn on hot wood, and a high smoke point is precisely the claim Crisco was making against butter and lard. The guava jelly in bread cases is a period marker too, a tropical import appearing as garnish.