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Mock Goose
2 cups breadcrumbs, 2 cups dropped black walnuts, 2 cups boiled rice, 6 hard-cooked eggs, 3 raw eggs, 1 tablespoon grated onion, salt, pepper and grated nutmeg to taste.
Put breadcrumbs in saucepan with 2 cups water; cook for a few minutes; add hard-cooked eggs, chopped; take saucepan from fire and add black walnut meats and the rice. When this is well mixed, add raw eggs, slightly beaten, and seasonings. Form this into shape of a goose, reserving portions for legs and wings. Take a tablespoon of mixture in your hand and press it into shape of a leg; put piece of dry macaroni into it for bone and fasten it to goose. Do other side same way. Form remaining portions into small pieces looking like wings tucked under; press them to side of goose. Brush goose over with melted Crisco and bake for 1 hour. Serve with apple sauce.
A meatless nut-and-egg loaf modelled into the shape of a bird, from a cookbook written to sell Crisco. The mixture is soft, so the moulding is the part that goes wrong.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. Bake at 350F for the stated hour; the mixture is already cooked through apart from the raw egg, so the time is about setting the binder and browning the surface.
- "Dropped" black walnutsProbably nuts that had fallen from the tree and then been shelled; in any case, shelled black walnut meats, chopped. Black walnut is far more assertive and slightly bitter compared with English walnut; two cups is a lot, and half black, half English gives a more balanced loaf.
- CriscoThe book was published to promote it. Any neutral solid or liquid fat works - melted shortening, oil or butter - and brushing again halfway through baking keeps the crust from drying to powder.
- Breadcrumbs and waterUse dry crumbs, not fresh, or two cups of water will turn the base to paste. Cook only until the crumbs have absorbed the liquid and the mass pulls away from the pan, then cool it before the raw eggs go in or they will scramble.
- Moulding itChill the mixture for an hour before shaping. Build the body on a greased shallow baking pan or sheet, and set the legs and wings on with a little of the mixture as mortar; a soft warm mass will slump into an anonymous mound in the oven.
- The macaroni bonesDry macaroni pushed into each leg is decoration only. It softens in the oven and is not meant to be eaten - lift the pieces out before serving, or the effect is lost on anyone who bites one.
- SeasoningRice, crumbs and hard-cooked egg are all bland. Season the mixture assertively and taste it before the raw eggs go in; nutmeg here should be a suggestion, not a note you can name.
- YieldSix to eight servings. Apple sauce is not optional in spirit - the loaf is rich and dense, and something sharp is what makes it read as a roast course.
"Mock" dishes run through Anglo-American cookery for two reasons: religious abstinence and thrift. A mock goose was often a stuffed shoulder of lamb or a marrow dressed with sage-and-onion so that the flavour, if not the bird, arrived at table, though the name covered other forms as well; here the deception is total, with nuts and eggs standing in for the meat entirely. This version belongs to the wave of American nut-loaf cookery that grew out of vegetarian and Seventh-day Adventist kitchens around the turn of the twentieth century, when nut meats were promoted as a protein substitute for flesh. The instruction to brush it with Crisco marks the book's origin: A Calendar of Dinners was produced to demonstrate uses for Procter & Gamble's new hydrogenated vegetable shortening, which reached the market in 1911. Black walnuts, gathered rather than bought, were a genuinely local ingredient - a reminder that a great many American households in this period still had access to food that fell off a tree.