Wiener Wednesday: Kraut & Frankfurter Plank Dinner (1971)

This is from THE MEATS COOKBOOK from Southern Living Magazine. I’ve been holding onto this one for a while, just waiting for the best moment to break it out. Look at the cover and you can see why.

Quick background–my former co-worker Valerie gave this to me. I do not know to whom in her family this cookbook belonged, but the binding is shot. Which means 1 of 2 things:

1. This is a well-loved and well-loved cookbook
2. Southern Living and Oxmoor House Books can’t bind for shit.

Either or. Whatever.

For this Wiener Wednesday I selected the Kraut & Frankfurter Plank Dinner from the “Specialty Meats” chapter.

I’d like to note that the methodology regarding the segmentation of this book is a mystery to me.

According to Southern Cooking, “Specialty Meats” = sweetbreads and liver and kidneys and tongue.

I thought that these were known as variety meats. But this chapter also includes frankfurters and salami and corned beef and SPAM.

Then there is the “Combination Meats” chapter, which is where I’d think that hot dogs would belong, but that chapter seems to focus on dishes that combine one or two meats. i.e. Ponderosa Beef Rolls (beef round and boiled ham)

City Chicken with Zesty Mustard Sauce (boneless veal and boneless pork)

Party Ham Loaf with Tropical Raisin Sauce (smoked ham and ground chuck…as well as corn flakes and raisins!)

Do you see why I am confused?

I am going to surmise that this is a Yankee vs. Dixie thing–like the whole stuffing/dressing debate (is this now going to drive everyone into a tizzy regarding the correct nomenclature?)

OK, let’s get to the dish at hand!

I don’t have a cedar plank to cook this on, so I not-so-logically (!) went to my unused Himalayan Salt Block.

I did research–do not put it oven! Do not put it broiler! But if it does break, you can put it in your own grinder and mill your on Himalayan salt!

Whatever. I increased the heat veeeery slowly, over the course of 2 or 3 hours (I didn’t track. It was the Sunday of a holiday weekend).

My brother said that when he cooked on the salt plank everything was so salty it could kill ya. So I was very aware to not salt anything while I was in the process of cooking. The kraut needed salt. But no! I wasn’t going to salt it! The carrots? Salt? YES. But no!

I will say that nothing turned out too salty–so that was a win for me.

I thought that this was actually quite good. Except for the fact that my Himalayan Salt Block was covered in a corn syrup mixture and was a thousand degrees so I let it sit in the oven overnight to cool down.

Meh. I’ll worry about that later.***

I’m still collecting ideas for my next Wiener Wednesday. Hit me with your worst! Either email yinzerella@gmail.com or reach out to me via the Facebook page.

If I get some good ones, I may put up the submissions for a vote later this week!

***Update: The mess wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. All the stickiness sloughed off rather easily–I am going to try cooking a steak on it tonight.