Categories
1900-1949 Food & Drink

Vintage recipes – Poor Man’s Goose, 1930

Christmas is coming and the goose is getting fat. Unless you’re having mock goose instead.

Mock versions of various meat dishes used to be fairly common in recipe books of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but you don’t tend to see recipes that seriously do this anymore. Thanks to Lewis Carroll, Mock Turtle Soup is probably the best-known example now.

I think the most recent recipe book I have that includes a mock creation was a 1970s Linda McCartney, which had a mock turkey for Christmas, mainly made of textured vegetable protein if I remember rightly. But there weren’t too many options for veggies in those days, you had to make your own fake meat if you wanted it. I was a vegetarian for seven years, during which time Linda McCartney first brought out her food range and it’s fair to say she was almost entirely responsible for bringing ready-made, specialised vegetarian food into the mainstream. I’m a big fan.

On that subject, in my vegetarian days, I remember eating something I bought from an international supermarket which was called “Mock Duck”. You can still get it, if you really want it. On the tin it says it’s made from “abalone”, but as I didn’t know what that was, I thought it must be something like tofu. Because why would you bother mocking meat unless it was to make it meat-free? Now I know that abalone is actually a kind of sea snail and so it was not only non-veggie, it was massively more hideous to boot. It did taste pretty bad, I have to say.

Oh, and to round up my knowledge of mocked food, there was also “mockolate” in Friends, as sold by the divine Michael McKean. That was disgusting too.

Mockolate

Anyway, it turns out then that the duck wasn’t being mocked for veggie reasons, but possibly for cost reasons instead (unless it was for “vegetarians” who still ate seafood, I suppose. That’s something I’ve never understood the reasoning for.) And cost used to be the reason these types of recipes existed at all. Which is why the mock goose below, from the 1930 Essex Cookery Book, is designated “Poor Man’s..”

Essex Cookery Book, 1930
Essex Cookery Book, 1930

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m not too sure how much like goose it would actually have been as it’s mainly made from liver and potatoes. In fact, it’s not just liver, the recipe specifies a strangely non-specific “pig’s liver, etc”. There’s a lot of room for manoeuvre in that “etc” – it could contain pretty much anything. Apart from sea snails, hopefully.

 

Essex Cookery Book, 1930
Essex Cookery Book, 1930

Poor Man’s Goose

1/2 lb. pig’s liver, etc
1 lb. potatoes
2 small onions
Pepper and salt
1/2 tsp chopped sage
Water

  1. Prepare potatoes and onions, cut into slices.
  2. Wash liver and cut into slices.
  3. Put all ingredients in layers in a pie-dish.
  4. Cover with potato, add sufficient water to half fill the dish.
  5. Put layer of caul or greased paper on the top.
  6. Cook for 2 hours.

If covered with paper, remove 1/2 hour before serving and brown the potato.

Categories
1900-1949 Food & Drink

How to Make Tea, 1930

So, is this instruction, from “The Essex Cookery Book”, the definitive way to make tea? With tea leaves, of course, old chap.

The Essex Cookery Book, 1930
The Essex Cookery Book, 1930

It seems so simple and yet, if you’re British, getting it right is so bloody important. Otherwise, you’re in the realms of Arthur Dent’s nightmare:

 

Categories
1900-1949 Food & Drink

How to Cook Vegetables, 1930

Some possibly useful information on how to cook vegetables from The Essex Cookery Book, 1930.

I’ve never heard of the dark/light theory of cooking vegetables. Vegetables grown in the dark should be cooked in the dark (i.e. covered with a lid) and vice versa, or so it says.

The Essex Cookery Book, 1930
The Essex Cookery Book, 1930

More carrot destruction here with the timings. Not quite as bad as the advice to cook them for two and a half hours from 1910 (see below) but people apparently really liked carrot mush back then. Also – in what universe does it take 15 minutes to cook spinach? You can see why we got our reputation for soggy veg.

The Essex Cookery Book, 1930
The Essex Cookery Book, 1930

Previous post here on Mrs Rea’s Cookery Book from 1910 – https://skittishlibrary.co.uk/the-good-the-bad-and-the-calfs-head/

Categories
1900-1949 Food & Drink

Vintage Recipes – Invalid Cookery, 1902-1930

If you look at practically any general cookbook from Victorian times up to the 1940s, you’re likely to find a section that has now entirely fallen by the wayside in modern books – special recipes for the sickroom, often called “Invalid cookery”.

This is the kind of thing:

(This is where I had embedded a video of the Fry and Laurie period sketch on broth vs soup, and which doesn’t exist anymore, and is also not in any of their sketch books. Which is a shame because it sums up invalid cookery perfectly.)

Incidentally, I seem to remember the recipes for Talbot’s Broth and Henry’s Soup actually did appear on Ceefax as mentioned in the sketch.

Now we have Heinz Tomato Soup, Lucozade, and better medicine, perhaps these gently nourishing recipes aren’t needed so much anymore. But I do like the idea of a special menu if you’re unwell. It marks the occasion, in a way. Recipes included gruel in many forms, blackcurrant tea, barley water, invalid custard, toast water and beef tea.

I’ve also got a number of recipes for the slightly alarming-sounding raw beef tea. I haven’t got a certificate in food hygiene admittedly, but this sounds like rather a potential nightmare. I mean, it’s not quite Talbot’s fried bull penis, but still.

Raw Beef Tea

1/4 lb lean beef
1/4 pint water
Few drops of lemon juice

Remove all fat and cut the beef up finely.
Put into the water with the lemon juice.
Let it stand for 6 or 8 hours, pressing beef with a spoon occasionally.
Strain.
Serve in a covered spoon.

This is only given in cases where it could not be assimilated if cooked.

Here’s some more recipes for the sick. Not sure if I’d fancy tripe as the best of times, to be honest, let alone while under the weather.

From Mrs Rea’s Cookery Book, 1910:

From The Liverpool School of Cookery Book, 1902:

From The Essex Cookery Book, 1930:

If you’re interested in this, I’ve previously posted about gruel and how Horlicks is the modern equivalent here – https://skittishlibrary.co.uk/vintage-recipes-gruel/

And I’ve tested out the nursery treat of Blackcurrant tea here – https://skittishlibrary.co.uk/vintage-recipes-blackcurrant-tea/

Categories
1900-1949 Food & Drink

Vintage recipes – Gruel, 1930

I always thought gruel was a slightly thinner version of porridge.

But I found this recipe in the “Essex Cookery Book” of 1930 by K. A. Willson and Margaret Hussey, and it turns out it’s almost homeopathic porridge, so tiny is the quantity of oatmeal – 1 tablespoon to a pint of water or milk.

It’s featured here as invalid cookery, which admittedly sounds like a perfectly fine use for it. But those having to actually survive on versions of this were pretty hard done by. No wonder Oliver Twist wanted more.

(As a side note, you may be interested to learn that the tradition survives these days in the form of the old favourite Horlicks which is technically gruel – http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruel)