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April 13
Menu: Indian Soup; Rice; Mock Goose, Apple Sauce; Stewed Celery; Pineapple Salad; Rhubarb Pie; Coffee 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 loaf sculpted to look like a bird, from the calendar-of-dinners section of a book written to sell a brand-new shortening. It works as a nut roast; the goose shape is optional theatre.
- "Dropped" black walnutsProbably shelled nutmeats, coarsely broken; the recipe later calls them simply "black walnut meats". Black walnuts are much stronger and more resinous than English walnuts; if you substitute the common walnut the loaf will taste noticeably milder and sweeter.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. A moderate oven, around 350F, should suit a loaf of this density for the stated hour; the surface should be firm and browned and the centre set.
- BreadcrumbsDry crumbs from stale bread are the likelier reading, since two cups of them will drink the two cups of water; fresh soft crumbs would turn the mixture to paste, so cut the water back and add it by eye.
- The riceTwo cups of boiled rice means cooked, cooled and drained, roughly two-thirds of a cup raw. Warm sticky rice makes the mixture unmouldable.
- The hinge: let it cool before the raw eggsThe instruction to take the pan from the fire matters. Three beaten eggs stirred into a hot mixture will scramble in streaks and the loaf will not bind. Cool it to warm, then fold them in.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, then brand new and reformulated many times since. Melted butter or oil brushed over the surface does the same job of browning.
- The macaroni bonesDry macaroni pushed into the moulded legs is structural rather than something to eat. Remove it before serving or warn whoever gets a leg.
- Shaping and panBuild the bird on a greased shallow baking dish or sheet rather than a loaf tin, or none of the sculpting survives. Support the legs and wings against the body; they will not hold if they project.
- YieldOn the quantities given it should serve six to eight as a main course. The apple sauce is more than decoration; it supplies acidity against the rich nut mixture.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, which had introduced the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening in 1911 and needed to teach cooks what to do with a fat that was neither butter nor lard. The book pairs recipes with a year-long calendar of dinners, which is why this one sits under a date alongside lobster Newburgh. "Mock" dishes like this were a long-established genre well before wartime rationing: mock turtle, mock duck, mock oyster, all trading on the pleasure of a familiar shape delivered by cheaper or meatless means. Black walnuts were gathered rather than bought across much of the eastern United States, and the goose modelling reflects a period taste for food that performed at the table. The recipe also suited households avoiding meat, and Crisco courted the kosher market directly.