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September 23
Menu: Mock Duck, Rice Stuffing; Buttered Beets; Lettuce Salad; Succotash; Grape Sherbet; Coffee 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 5 minutes; add celery, hard-cooked 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 shaped and glazed to suggest a roast bird, from the Crisco company's own Calendar of Dinners. The original gives no oven temperature and no yield, so both need filling in.
- Oven temperatureNone is stated, as was normal in 1913. A moderate oven, 350F, for the full hour suits an egg-bound loaf of this size; the surface browns without the outside drying before the centre sets.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. The tablespoon of salt, however, is generous even for ten cups of mixture — start with two teaspoons, taste the cooked crumb base before the raw eggs go in, and adjust.
- CriscoAny neutral solid shortening works, and butter gives a better flavour and browner crust. The two tablespoons in the mixture are there for richness only; the brushing fat is what forms the glaze.
- Black walnutsTwo cups is a real quantity of a strong, resinous nut and it carries the dish. Black walnuts are usually sold already shelled, since the shells are notoriously hard; English walnuts substitute but give a much milder, blander loaf.
- The crumb baseCooking two cups of crumbs in a pint of water for five minutes makes a thick paste, not a soup. Use dry crumbs, not fresh soft ones, or the mixture will be too wet to hold a shape.
- ShapingThe mixture must be stiff enough to mound. Chill it 20-30 minutes before forming, build the duck on a shallow baking pan, and baste with melted fat once or twice during the hour to keep the ridges from cracking.
- DonenessThree raw eggs are the only binder, so judge by the centre: 160F on a thermometer, firm to a pressed finger, and a knife withdrawn clean.
- YieldThis is a large loaf — roughly eight to ten servings. It slices better warm than hot; let it stand ten minutes. The apple sauce is not optional decoration, it supplies the acidity the nuts and rice need.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach cooks what to do with a brand-new product: a hydrogenated vegetable shortening sold as a replacement for both lard and butter. The day-by-day "Calendar of Dinners" menus that carry dated entries like this September one belong to Procter & Gamble's Crisco cookery series (the calendar of 365 dinners appears in the later A Calendar of Dinners rather than being a section of the 1913 edition), and this entry is one of several dishes built to imitate meat without using any. "Mock" dishes of this kind — mock duck, mock turtle, mock oyster — were a long-established habit in Anglo-American cookery, borrowing a familiar name and shape for cheaper or absent materials. Two details mark it as distinctly American: the black walnuts, a native nut with a flavour far stronger than the European walnut and long gathered rather than bought, and the apple sauce, a standard accompaniment to roast duck and goose that here does the work of signalling what the loaf is pretending to be. Crisco's own interest was plainer still: a shortening made from cottonseed oil contained no animal fat, which made it usable by cooks keeping kosher or meatless tables, and the company advertised that fact energetically.