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Mock Duck
Mrs. C. C. Stratton.
Take the round of beefsteak, salt and pepper either side; prepare bread or crackers with oysters or without, as for stuffing a turkey; lay your stuffing on the meat; sew up and roast about an hour; and if you do not see the wings and legs you will think you have roast duck.
A stuffed and rolled beef roast under a fanciful name. The recipe gives no temperature and no weight, so the two things to fix are the oven and the cut.
- The cut"The round of beefsteak" means a slice cut across the round. A top round steak butterflied and pounded to about 1/2 inch will roll without splitting. The recipe names no weight; 1 1/2 to 2 lb is a workable size, but that is our figure, not hers.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none, and in this period "roasting" was often done before a fire rather than in an oven. As a modern equivalent, a hot oven of about 400F, dropped to 350F if it browns too fast, works; an hour is realistic for a roll of about 2 lb.
- The hinge: keep it moistTop round has almost no fat and turns dry and grey when overdone. Rub the outside with butter or drippings, add half a cup of stock to the pan, and pull the roll at 135-140F internal for pink beef. Rest it ten minutes before slicing.
- OystersIf you use them, chop them coarsely, fold them raw into the crumbs with a little of their liquor, and count on them cooking through inside the roll. Pre-cooking them first, then roasting an hour, gives rubbery oysters.
- The stuffing"as for stuffing a turkey" would mean dried bread or cracker crumbs with butter, onion, sage or summer savoury, salt and pepper, bound with a little stock or egg. Keep it dry and loose; a wet stuffing will make the roll fall apart.
- Sewing upSew the long edge with cotton kitchen twine and a trussing needle, or tie the roll at 1-inch intervals. Remove all twine before slicing, and cut across the roll so each slice shows a spiral.
- SeasoningSalt and pepper both faces of the meat before the stuffing goes on, since nothing else seasons the interior.
- YieldA roll of about 2 lb serves four to six. Pan juices thickened with a spoon of flour make a gravy, though the recipe never mentions one.
"Mock" dishes run right through Victorian cookery -- mock turtle, mock oyster, mock cream -- and nearly all of them substitute something cheap and available for something dear or out of season. This one uses the flat round of beef, one of the least expensive cuts, rolled around a poultry-style bread stuffing so the sliced result looks and tastes like stuffed fowl; Mrs. Stratton's closing joke about the wings and legs is the whole point of the name. The idea travelled: mock duck of beef, veal or pork appears in American and British community cookbooks well into the twentieth century, and a quite separate wheat-gluten "mock duck" became a staple of Chinese-American and vegetarian cooking later on. The Home Cook Book itself, first published in Chicago in the 1870s, was assembled from contributions signed by named local women and sold for charity, which is why so many entries read like this one -- a neighbour's method, written down as she would have told it to you.""