By Lauren Samuelsson
Then the Queen left off, quite out of breath, and said to Alice, ‘Have you seen the Mock Turtle yet?’
‘No,’ said Alice. ‘I don’t even know what a Mock Turtle is.’
‘It’s the thing Mock Turtle Soup is made from,’ said the Queen.
— Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1869.
Like the puzzled Alice, many Australians may never have heard of ‘Mock Turtle’ before. Nor will they likely have had the pleasure of eating any of the mock recipes that graced the Australian table up until the late 1960s. Recipes for mock foods used to be remarkably popular, and yet in our modern era the only mock foods we encounter regularly are vegetarian and vegan substitutes for meat, and perhaps mock cream. So, what happened to mock recipes? When did they disappear from our plates, and why did they do so?
The Australian Women’s Weekly (the Weekly) can tell us a lot about the demise of the mock recipe in Australian food culture. The Weekly is an Australian institution. It is still Australia’s most widely read women’s magazine, a position that it has held since its establishment in 1933. During the 1950s and 60s it had the largest circulation per capita of any women’s magazine in the world and was read in twenty-five per cent of Australian homes. Food and cooking have held an integral position in the magazine since the very first issue. The Weekly provided food editorials and didactic ‘how to’ features while also engaging with its readers by having them send in favourite recipes for their weekly recipe competition. By virtue of both its popularity and proliferation, the Weekly can tell us many stories about Australian culture, including the story of why we eat the way we eat.
It can also illuminate the contribution of mock foods to the Australian vocabulary. Food is a productive area for Australian English, and the many food terms that have come and gone in our lexicon over the years reveal the social history of Australia. Several mock foods are recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), including mock turtle, mock brawn, mock venison, and mock goose. Most of these terms are first recorded in the 18th century. As we shall see, the Weekly reveals a number of others, and also attests to the popularity of certain ‘mock’ dishes in Australian culture, notably mock chicken and mock duck.
Mock Duck. One pound lean rump steak, 1 onion, 4 tablespoons breadcrumbs, 1 egg, 1 dessertspoon butter, salt, cayenne, rashers of bacon, cold water, gelatine. Mince the onion, add crumbs, seasoning, and butter. Bind with the beaten egg. Spread this mixture on the steak and roll up to look as much like a duck as possible; fasten with string. Put into baking dish. Cover with rashers of bacon, add dripping. Bake in moderate oven about ¾ hour. Remove bacon and allow ‘duck’ to brown. Make a little gravy, [mix] well, add a little gelatine, and when beginning to set pour over the cold duck. Decorate with thin strips of gherkin and leave in cold place. Serve sliced with salads. (Australian Women’s Weekly, 24 December 1938)
This recipe for mock duck (a term first recorded in the OED in 1907) was shared by the Weekly’s food editor Mary Forbes, and was the star dish of an editorial feature dedicated to the perfect Christmas picnic menu. The recipe, which is a rolled, stuffed steak, instructs the cook to ‘roll up the steak to look as much like a duck as possible’; an interesting proposition given ducks usually have wings and legs! The recipe raises many questions. How does one fashion steak into the shape of a duck? And perhaps more importantly, why does one fashion steak into the shape of a duck? What can the popularity of mock recipes, like this mock duck, tell us about Australia’s culinary habits?
The British culinary tradition is no stranger to mock foods, as the OED evidence suggests. The most famous of these is perhaps the ‘Mock Turtle Soup’ referenced by Lewis Carroll, which was wildly popular during the mid-nineteenth century. The soup saw turtle being replaced by a calf’s head, which was supposed to mimic the gelatinous texture of real turtle. Mock foods were designed to either look or taste like the ‘real thing,’ and were usually a response to scarcity (either seasonal or economic).
In light of this, it is perhaps unsurprising that mock foods were remarkably popular during the 1930s and 40s. Analysis of the Weekly shows that there was a sharp decline in mock foods after the Second World War, and by the late 1970s, they were almost nonexistent. Of the just over 300 mock recipes found in the Weekly from 1933 to 1982, two thirds were published during the 1930s and 40s, with almost half of this number being published during the war years. This indicates that mock foods in the Weekly were indeed a response to scarcity: economic during the 1930s, and as a result of wartime rationing in the 1940s. The recipes themselves are inventive and imaginative, which tells us that Australian women really cared about what they were serving their families. In the face of scarcity, they took their meagre resources and transformed them into something special.
The names of the recipes can tell us a lot about their role as an antidote for scarcity. Recipes for ‘Whipped Austerity Cream’ and ‘Poor Man’s Pate de Fois Gras’ leave little doubt that the recipes being provided were cheaper alternatives to the ‘real thing’. This is also reflected in the ingredients: cheaper cuts of meat, or no meat at all, are used as a substitute for more expensive cuts; egg white stands in for cream; breadcrumbs for almond meal. The majority of mock recipes were submitted by readers as a part of the Weekly’s recipe competition, which is an indication that they were being cooked on a reasonably regular basis, as recipes contributed by readers can be considered to be an acceptable reflection of what people were cooking.
So, what were they cooking? Some of the ‘mock recipes’ that made multiple and
regular appearances, by virtue of which they could be considered popular, included mock oysters, mock marzipan, mock ham, mock champagne, and the ubiquitous mock cream (a chiefly Australian item, first recorded in Australian English in 1879). While all of these recipes are no doubt interesting and can tell us a great deal about Australian culinary culture, there is one type of mock recipe that really stands out: mock chicken.
Today, chicken is cheap and abundant. Australians are among the highest consumers of chicken meat in the world. However, before the implementation of modern chicken farming practices in the mid-twentieth century, poultry, particularly chicken, was a novelty. It was a dish served on celebratory occasions such as Christmas (or when the laying hen stopped laying).
Mock chicken was a remarkably popular family recipe in Australia, brought to the table in many forms: mock chicken croquettes, mock chicken mould, mock chicken cutlets, mock chicken loaf, and the popular mock chicken pie. One recipe in particular demonstrates the power of the mock recipe to transform cheap ingredients into ‘something special’.
Savory Mock Chicken Pie. One pound tripe, 1 onion, 3 or 4 thick slices of stale bread, 1 egg, 1 tablespoon chopped parsley, ¼ teaspoon thyme, salt and pepper, squeeze of lemon, 1lb green peas, 1 dessertspoon butter. Blanch the tripe and cut into small pieces. Cover with water, add onion and 1 teaspoon salt and simmer until tender, about 1 hour. Make a seasoning by moistening the bread with the tripe stock, add chopped onion from the stock, beaten egg, chopped parsley, thyme and lemon, pepper and salt to taste. Place a layer of bread seasoning in a greased ovenproof dish, cover with tripe, then cooked green peas. Lastly cover with a layer of seasoning and dot with butter. Bake in a moderate oven (375 deg. F.) for 45 minutes. (Australian Women’s Weekly, 9 February 1946)
This recipe for ‘Savory Mock Chicken Pie’ won first prize for Miss M. Bell from South Australia in the weekly recipe competition in February 1946, and substituted tripe for chicken. Historically, Australians have had a complicated relationship with offal consumption, as it is generally associated with poverty. In a revealing statement regarding Australian attitudes towards offal in the interwar period, the 1936 report of the Advisory Council on Nutrition claimed that Australians, particularly those on lower incomes, harboured ‘a deeply-rooted prejudice… against the eating of internal organs’. (First Report of the Advisory Council on Nutrition)
Miss M. Bell was clever, however. By simply calling this recipe by another more creative name that held no reference to the tripe it contained, the dish became palatable—or certainly palatable enough for her to win one pound for her recipe! ‘Tripe Pie’ sounds positively depressing, but ‘Savory Mock Chicken Pie’ created from exactly the same ingredients has a more sophisticated ring to it. Chicken was imbued with higher status than tripe in the Australian middle-class home, and the enterprising home cook used her ingenuity to jazz up a frugal dish and please her family.
By the 1960s, chicken became economical enough for a ‘reasonable family meal’. An editorial from 1961 claimed that ‘Scientific farming is helping to reduce the price of chicken … in the near future bigger, tastier chickens will be on sale to the housewife at a cost comparable with the average meat price.’ (Australian Women’s Weekly, 12 April 1961) Reflecting the growing affordability of chicken, the data I collected from the magazine shows the gradual disappearance of mock chicken. By the 1970s it was non-existent in the pages of the Weekly, after reaching a peak in the 1940s.
The Australian food culture of the 1930s and 40s was a food culture of austerity. The Depression and the scarcity of the war years made for a lean table. But this does not mean that Australian women gave up caring about the quality and appetite appeal of the food that they were creating. Evidence from the Weekly suggests that women were interested in innovative ways of preparing food within the limitations of the time – and mock foods were one way that they achieved this. They inventively transformed low cost, low status, and unrationed ingredients from the mundane to the novel, with a little bit of imagination. Australian women were showing a propensity for creativity, experimentation and improvisation, which are key elements of our modern Australian food culture. As a result of improving economic conditions, mock foods had almost entirely disappeared by the late 1960s. Mock chicken, mock hollandaise, and mock champagne were relegated to a nostalgic historical curiosity as post-war affluence arrived.
Lauren Samuelsson is a history PhD candidate at the University of Wollongong. Her interests include the history of food and drink, popular culture, and Australian cultural history. Her doctoral research focuses on the Australian Women’s Weekly and its role in the development of Australian food culture during its first fifty years of publication. Email: [email protected]
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