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March 28
Menu: Anchovy Eclairs; Planked Shad, Butter Sauce; Cucumbers; Potato Puff; Asparagus Salad; Cheese Sandwiches; Cafe Parfait; Coffee Planked Shad-Clean and split down the back a good 3-pound shad. Heat plank very hot, lay fish upon it, skin side down, or that portion will be raw. The hot plank cooks it. Brush flesh carefully over with olive oil, then sprinkle with salt and pepper. Bake for 30 minutes in a hot Baste frequently with melted Crisco. It may be cooked in a gas range having the flame over the fish. When cooked pour over the fish 2 tablespoons melted Crisco and juice of 1 lemon. Garnish with parsley and quarters of lemon. Set the plank on a serving dish and serve with butter sauce. oven.
The text has come through the scanner scrambled — "Bake for 30 minutes in a hot" and the stray "oven. March 29" at the end belong together, and the calendar date is the dinner it was assigned to. Read it as: bake 30 minutes in a hot oven.
- The plank is the whole pointA cooking plank is a slab of untreated hardwood, traditionally oak or hickory. It must be preheated until genuinely hot before the fish goes on, exactly as the recipe insists, or the skin side will not cook and stays raw.
- "Hot oven" means 425-450F"Hot oven" -- In books of this date the term generally means something in the region of 400-450F. At that heat a split three-pound shad may be done before the full half hour; check the thickest part of the flesh at the shoulder.
- The gas-range alternative"A gas range having the flame over the fish" is the overhead broiler. Under a modern broiler the fish will cook considerably faster than 30 minutes, and needs watching throughout.
- CriscoStill sold, though reformulated more than once since 1913 and now made without partially hydrogenated oil. Melted butter or a neutral oil does the same work here; the book is a Procter & Gamble advertisement and specifies Crisco at every opportunity.
- Shad bonesAmerican shad is famously bony — a lattice of floating intramuscular bones that no amount of cooking dissolves. Ask a fishmonger to bone it, or accept that guests will pick. Splitting down the back and cooking it flat, as here, at least makes the bone rows easy to follow.
- Buying itShad is a seasonal spring run and stocks are far lower than in 1913; several Atlantic and river fisheries are closed or tightly limited. Substitute bluefish, mackerel or a whole trout if shad is unavailable, and expect a different flavour.
- Butter sauceThe period sense is drawn butter — melted butter thickened lightly with flour and thinned with water or fish liquor, seasoned with lemon. Not hollandaise.
- YieldA three-pound whole shad, split, feeds three or four once the head, backbone and rib cage are accounted for.
Planked shad belongs to the shad-bake tradition of the Delaware, Hudson and Connecticut rivers, where the spring run was a civic event and the fish was nailed to oak boards and propped in a ring around an open fire. Restaurants and hotel dining rooms of the late nineteenth century domesticated the method by planking the fish in a hot oven, and by the time The Story of Crisco appeared in 1913 planked shad was familiar enough to turn up here on March 29, in a calendar of dinners built to show the new vegetable shortening doing every job that butter and lard had done. The book's real subject is Crisco itself, introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911; the recipes are the vehicle, and the frequent basting instructions are advertising as much as cookery.