One of the types of recipes you see in older community cookbooks is the mock recipes. Now there are two types of mock recipes. There is the mock recipe that substitutes one ingredient for another and then there is a mock recipe that is a light-hearted look at such things as "furnishing a church" or "how to cook a husband."
For today we will be looking at a recipe that is a substitution. These types of recipes can be found in older cookbooks and were used because an ingredient became too expensive or scarce. I have seen them for ingredients like oysters and turtle. During the World War II years you would see more of these mock recipes as women had to get by with less and be more creative with food.
Cook Book Compiled by the Ladies of Center Presbyterian Church. Crawfordsville, Indiana. Revised Christmas 1894 is one of the older cookbooks in my collection. It provides recipes as well as housekeeping tips. Like many other community cookbooks of this era, there are few details about the women except for their names. In this case not all of the names are mentioned, one recipe is attributed to "A Housekeeper."
Today's recipe is for mock terrapin. It may seem weird to substitute beef for terrapin (turtle) but I know in other books I have read calf's head, and according to this recipe calf's liver, taste remarkably similar to turtle.
I don't really see mock recipes, those substituting one ingredient for another, in cookbooks anymore. Do you have a mock recipe that you cook? Did your family have a favorite mock recipe?
