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Chautauqua Muscallonge (Wash the fish as little)
Wash the fish as little as possible and wipe dry, have a long griddle with salt pork or plenty of butter; put the fish on this hot griddle and cover; cook one hour over a moderate fire, turn fish and brown both sides. Planked muscallonge is very fine. Planked the same as shad.
A whole-fish griddle method written for a fish that most cooks will have to substitute for. The timing is the part to ignore.
- One hour is far too longMuskellunge is a lean, firm white-fleshed fish, and an hour on a covered griddle will dry it to cotton. Fish is cooked through at 145F at the thickest part next to the backbone (the USDA figure; some cooks pull it a few degrees earlier), which for a 3-4 lb whole fish means roughly 25-35 minutes; thick steaks or fillets want 8-12 minutes total.
- "A long griddle"Not a modern flat cooktop griddle but a heavy iron oblong pan long enough to hold a whole fish, closer to a fish kettle or a large rectangular skillet. A big cast-iron roasting pan or two burners' worth of a rectangular griddle pan with a lid or foil tent does the same job.
- "A moderate fire"On a wood range this meant a steady bed without flame, roughly medium-low on a burner. Covered cooking here is really steam-frying, so the heat should be low enough that the pork fat does not smoke over the whole cooking time.
- Salt porkSliced thin and rendered first, it supplies both fat and seasoning; salt pork varies a good deal in saltiness, so hold back on salting the fish until you have tasted the pan. Plenty of butter, the alternative given, will brown and burn at length — clarified butter or butter cut with a neutral oil is steadier.
- Getting the fish to releaseWiping the fish dry, as instructed, is the whole trick. A wet skin steams rather than sears and will stick and tear when you turn it. Let the first side set fully before attempting the turn, and turn once only.
- PlankingPlanked shad meant nailing or tying a split fish, skin down, to a seasoned hardwood plank and standing it before an open fire, basting with butter; a very hot oven or grill is the modern substitute. Untreated cedar or oak planks sold for grilling work; soak them and expect roughly 20-30 minutes for a split fish.
- Finding the fishMuskellunge is a game fish rather than a market fish, and commercial sale is prohibited in most US states and Canadian provinces; anglers face season and minimum-size rules, and large specimens carry mercury advisories in many waters. Northern pike, walleye, or another firm-fleshed lake fish take to this treatment.
- YieldThe original assumes a whole fish for the table. Figure about 1 lb of whole fish per person, or 6 oz of fillet, and serve with lemon and the pan fat spooned over.
Chautauqua Lake in western New York was famous in the late nineteenth century for two things: the Chautauqua Assembly, the summer institute that gave its name to the lecture circuit, and its muskellunge, the largest member of the pike family. Hotels around the lake are often said to have made a specialty of the fish, and its appearance in a general-purpose American cookbook of the period reflects the era's habit of naming a dish for the water it came from, the way one finds Potomac shad or Kennebec salmon. The planking instruction points to a still older tradition, generally traced to Native American and early colonial practice along the Atlantic rivers, where split shad were fixed to boards and set upright before a hardwood fire; by 1900 planked shad dinners were a fixture of Delaware and Susquehanna river towns, and the technique was borrowed for whatever large fish was locally abundant.