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June 12
Menu: Cream of Tomato Soup; Planked Salmon; Potato Balls; Fresh Green Peas; Lettuce and Cucumber Salad; Cheese Bread-Sticks; Lemon Pudding; Coffee Planked Salmon-Have salmon cut in steaks 12 or 2 inches thick. 2 steaks of average size can be placed on medium-sized plank. Crisco plank thoroughly, place fish upon it, and broil under gas broiler, turning flame low after first few moments. Or it can be baked in oven of range. Serve on plank, surrounded by potato balls cut with French vegetable cutter. Heat 1/4 cup cream, add salt and pepper to taste, and 3 tablespoons finely chopped parsley. Shake potato balls in this until well covered with seasonings. Serve Hollandaise sauce with planked salmon.
A menu-book entry from Procter & Gamble's Crisco promotional cookbook, written for a cook who already knew how to season a plank and make Hollandaise. Two details need fixing before you start: the steak thickness is a typographical casualty, and the plank itself needs seasoning.
- "12 or 2 inches thick"This is almost certainly a mangled "1 1/2 or 2 inches." Cut salmon steaks 1 1/2 to 2 inches thick; anything thinner will dry out before the plank contributes anything.
- Season the plank first"Crisco plank thoroughly" means rub it all over with solid shortening — any neutral oil does the same job. Oil an untreated hardwood plank generously and heat it before the fish goes on. Untreated planks scorch and can smoke heavily under a broiler.
- Broiler managementThe instruction to turn the flame low after the first few minutes is doing real work: it sears the surface, then finishes gently. On an electric broiler, move the plank down a rack instead. Watch the plank edges, which char faster than the fish cooks.
- Oven alternativeThe book gives no temperature. Baking rather than broiling, roughly 400F for about 12-18 minutes for a 1 1/2-inch steak. Modern kitchens commonly pull salmon at 125-130F at the thickest point for a moist center, though official guidance is 145F; period fish recipes generally cooked to opacity throughout, which today reads as overdone.
- Potato ballsThe "French vegetable cutter" is most likely a ball cutter, the parisienne scoop sold today as a melon baller. Cut the balls from peeled raw potatoes and boil or steam them until just tender before tossing in the seasoned cream — the recipe omits the cooking step.
- The cream dressingA quarter cup of warmed cream with salt, pepper and parsley is a coating, not a sauce. Heat it gently and toss the hot drained potatoes in it off the heat so it clings rather than separating.
- HollandaiseNo recipe is given on this page. Any standard butter-and-yolk emulsion works; hold it warm but never hot, or it will break on the way to the table.
- YieldTwo average steaks on one plank serve two to four, depending on whether the salmon is the centerpiece or part of a longer menu, which in this book it usually was.
Crisco, hydrogenated cottonseed shortening, was launched by Procter & Gamble in 1911, and the company published book-length advertisements for it: The Story of Crisco (1913) and A Calendar of Dinners, the latter assigning a menu to each day of the year — the "June 13" tag places this page in that calendar format. Cooking fish on a board is generally traced to Northeastern Native American practice, adopted and formalized by nineteenth-century American cooks; shad planking in the Chesapeake and Potomac region is the best-documented survival of it. By the 1910s the plank had become a restaurant and hotel presentation, sold as a serving dish with a rim of piped potato or, as here, a border of scooped potato balls, and the point of the whole arrangement was that the food arrived at the table on the hot wood it was cooked on. Crisco's role in the recipe is small and entirely characteristic of the book: one greasing job that butter or lard would have done, claimed for the new product.