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Mock Duck
1 cup chopped celery, 2 cups breadcrumbs, 2 cups chopped black walnut meats, 2 cups boiled rice, 6 hard-cooked eggs, 3 raw eggs, 1 tablespoon grated onion, 1 tablespoon salt, 1 saltspoon pepper, and 2 tablespoons Crisco. Cook crumbs with 1 pint water for eggs, chopped; remove from fire, add Crisco, nuts, rice and seasonings. Mix well with raw eggs, slightly beaten. Form into shape of duck, brush over with melted Crisco and bake 1 hour. Serve with apple sauce.
A meatless loaf from one of Marion Harris Neil's Crisco books, shaped by hand into a bird and served with apple sauce as roast duck would be. The written method is compressed to the point of confusion, so read the notes before starting.
- The garbled line"Cook crumbs with 1 pint water for eggs, chopped" — appears to be a mangling of two instructions: soften the crumbs in a pint of water, and add the six hard-cooked eggs, chopped. The celery is never mentioned again either — add it with the nuts and rice, or sweat it briefly first if you want it tender.
- OvenNo temperature is given. A loaf of this kind belongs in a moderate oven, 350F, for the stated hour; the surface should set and colour without the outside drying before the centre is hot.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. The tablespoon of salt, however, is aggressive for this volume — start with two teaspoons and correct, remembering the raw egg means you cannot taste the finished mix freely.
- CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and this book exists to sell it. Butter or a neutral oil works identically here; the two tablespoons are for richness and the brushing is purely to help the surface brown.
- Black walnutsJuglans nigra, not the English walnut, and the difference is the whole point of the dish — black walnuts are resinous and almost meaty, which is what does the impersonating. English walnuts give a much blander loaf. Chop them fine or the shape will not hold.
- ShapingTwo cups of boiled rice and softened crumbs make a mixture that will slump. Chill it for half an hour before forming, build the duck on a greased shallow pan, and keep it low and compact rather than sculptural. A loaf tin is the unromantic but reliable alternative.
- YieldSomething over two quarts of mixture — eight generous servings. It slices better warm than hot, and the leftovers fry well the next day.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which the company introduced in 1911, and its recipes call for the shortening by name throughout. "Mock duck" is one of a long family of Victorian and Edwardian mock dishes — mock turtle, mock oyster, mock apple — in which a cheaper or meatless material is worked into the form and accompaniments of a costlier one. The disguise here is done less by taste than by ritual: the loaf is shaped into a bird and sent to the table with apple sauce, the sauce conventionally served with roast duck and goose. Nut loaves of this sort were also common in vegetarian and Seventh-day Adventist cooking of the period, where black walnuts and rice stood in for roast meat at the centre of the meal.