Home › Meat › Pressed Mock Chicken
Pressed Mock Chicken
Boil a piece of fresh shoulder of pork until tender, adding pepper and salt to the water in which it is cooked. When done, run the meat through the meat chopper and return to the liquor in which it was boiled in the kettle. Add enough rolled oats to absorb or thicken the liquid, season to suit the taste, and simmer from twenty to thirty minutes; then pack into a bowl or crock; when cold, slice and place between thin slices of lightly buttered white bread. Garnish with pickles and radish roses.
A cooked pork loaf bound with oatmeal rather than gelatin or egg — closer to a soft scrapple than to a terrine. The whole thing hinges on getting the oat-to-liquid ratio right, since the recipe gives no quantities at all.
- The cut"Fresh shoulder of pork" means uncured pork shoulder, sold now as picnic shoulder or Boston butt. Do not substitute a cured or smoked shoulder; the salt level will be unmanageable once reduced. Two to three pounds, bone in, is a workable amount.
- Boiling timeTender means fork-tender and pulling from the bone — about 2 to 2 1/2 hours at a bare simmer for a 3 lb piece. A hard boil toughens the muscle and clouds the liquor you need for binding.
- Rolled oats, unmeasured"Enough to absorb or thicken" is genuinely ambiguous. Work in old-fashioned rolled oats a half cup at a time into roughly 3 cups of hot liquor and chopped meat; stop when a spoon drawn through leaves a track that closes slowly. Quick oats absorb faster and go pasty, so add them more cautiously.
- The 20 to 30 minute simmerThis is not for the meat, which is already cooked — it is to hydrate the oats fully so the loaf sets rather than weeping. Stir often at low heat; the mixture is thick and will scorch on the bottom.
- Setting and slicingPack tight into a loaf pan or bowl to eliminate air pockets, press the surface flat, and chill at least 6 hours. Modern practice: cool it quickly, cover, and refrigerate rather than leaving it standing in a crock at room temperature. Slice about 1/4 inch thick with a thin-bladed knife.
- SeasoningSeason the cooking water generously and then taste again after the oats go in — cereal starch flattens salt noticeably. Sage, a little onion, and black pepper are period-appropriate additions and much needed.
- KeepingTreat it as any cooked pork product: 3 to 4 days refrigerated. It freezes well in the loaf, less well in slices.
- YieldA 3 lb shoulder gives roughly a 9-inch loaf, enough for 10 to 12 sandwiches. Butter the bread thinly, as directed, so the slices hold together against a fairly moist filling.
"Mock" dishes fill a great deal of space in turn-of-the-century American cookery — mock turtle, mock duck, mock oyster — and the name usually promises a resemblance in texture or appearance rather than any deceit about the meat. Here the pale, fine-grained pork loaf slices up looking much like pressed chicken, which was the more expensive sandwich filling of the two. The oatmeal is doing the same work cornmeal does in Pennsylvania scrapple: stretching a cheap shoulder and its cooking liquor into something sliceable. Rolled oats were newly cheap and widely advertised in this period, and cookbooks of the 1900s pressed them into service well beyond breakfast. Sandwich books like this one belonged to the era of the afternoon tea, the lunch pail, and the picnic hamper, when a firm cold loaf that cut cleanly was worth more to a cook than one that tasted elaborate.