Mock filet mignon
It was a time of making do and doing without.
The Great Depression forced thousands out of their jobs, but most of the burden was shouldered by the homemaker, who had to keep the family fed.
By 1933, the unemployment rate in Toronto hit 30 per cent. The poorest, those on relief, got $1.07 worth of groceries each week. A standard order included no milk, no eggs. The only protein came from a tin of salmon and a half pound each of beans and bacon.
Vegetables were limited to a tin of tomatoes.
Those who were lucky enough to have steady employment also felt the pinch, as businesses slashed wages, and certain foods – such as chicken and eggs – were rare in the city.
Dorothy Duncan's book, Canadians at Table: Food, Fellowship and Folklore, notes that popcorn became popular because it was so filling, and frugal recipes were passed around such as Economical Chicken Salad, which stretched one cup of cooked chicken into a meal for 10 people.
Still not everyone was suffering. The Royal York Hotel's dinner menu for Aug. 15, 1933, was quite extensive, offering shrimp cocktail (80 cents), grilled Lake Ontario trout (85 cents), Gaspé salmon ($1), Porterhouse steak ($2.25) and Chateaubriand for three ($4.50). The menu also warned that a "single portion (is) served to one person only."
And a February 1933 ad in The Toronto Daily Star, shows that it was possible to buy a leg of lamb (19 cents a pound), prime rib (13 cents a pound) and even halibut (18 cents a pound) from the local Atlantic and Pacific Tea Co. – the A&P – "where economy rules," as its slogan read. Butter was 24 cents a pound, while 25 cents could purchase a dozen oranges – a luxury item when a head of cabbage cost five cents.
"There was lots of talk of making do," says Duncan, an expert on Canadian culinary history who was born in Oshawa in 1927 and moved to the family farm in Pickering in 1933 when she was 6.
"There was lots of bread being used in things like stuffings and bread puddings."
The most ingenious got busy in the kitchen, where they created substitutes for the favourite foods they could not afford or couldn't find.
In 1935, the Star published a recipe for coffee "cream" that combined egg yolk, sugar and water. The Canadian Woman's Cook Book of 1939 contains six recipes for fake foods, including almonds made of croutons, a bisque with tomatoes but no shellfish, cherry pie with cranberries and raisins, and a mock sausage filled with mashed beans and bread crumbs.
One of Kraft Food's most requested recipes is Mock Apple Pie, which substitutes 36 crushed Ritz crackers for apples, baked in a pie crust along with two cups of sugar, butter, lemon, cream of tartar and cinnamon. It was introduced in 1935, one year after the Ritz cracker, according to Jean Anderson's American Century Cookbook.
Chicken was in short supply, so in the pages of the Star you could find food writer Jessie Marie De Both's recipe for Mock Chicken Legs with Grilled Tomato and Spaghetti, where pork and veal stood in for poultry, and a skewer stood in for the bone. Loblaws was selling mock chicken for five cents a leg in 1934, according to an ad in the Star. "Everyone may have a drumstick when mock chicken legs are served," the ad said.
My favourite is the recipe for mock filet mignon reproduced in Kate Aitken's Canadian Cook Book, first published in 1945. The original recipe, which predates World War II, gives instructions to cook in a "hot oven," because most wood stoves of that time didn't include a temperature gauge in Fahrenheit, unlike the electric and gas models that replaced them.
Much like mock chicken, mock filet mignon's sole purpose was to remind people they could not afford the real thing, since the dishes only vaguely resembled their namesakes and tasted nothing like them.
In tribute to the resourcefulness of the women of the '30s, the Star will publish a Depression-era recipe each day until Saturday, beginning with Mock Filet Mignon.
Only from a distance could you mistake this meal for tenderloin.
Basically it's meatloaf wrapped in bacon. If you have homemade chili sauce, all the better, but you can substitute store-bought or use ketchup.
Mock filet mignon is cheap and delicious, if you're not afraid of bacon fat. As the meat cooks, the juices run down into the mashed potato patty, giving it a reddish hue and a blast of flavour. From Kate Aitken's Canadian Cook Book.
INGREDIENTS
1 lb lean ground beef
1/2 lb ground pork
1/3 cup chili sauce
1/4 tsp dry mustard
Dash of pepper and paprika
1 small onion (1/2 cup) finely diced
6 strips bacon (about 1/4 pound)
2 lb Yukon gold potatoes, peeled and quartered
1/4 cup hot milk
1/2 tsp salt
DIRECTIONS
In a large bowl, combine meat, chili sauce, mustard, pepper, paprika and onion, mixing well. Shape into 6 pucks about 2 inches tall. Wrap strip of bacon around each; fasten with toothpick. Set aside.
Cook potatoes in large pot of boiling water until soft enough to mash, about 20 minutes.
Beat potatoes with hot milk and salt. Form into six flat patties big enough to hold the mock filets; place on baking sheet. Top with meat.
Bake 10 minutes in 450F oven; reduce to 350F and bake 30 minutes, until bacon is crisp and meat is cooked through.
Makes 6 servings.
Star-tested by Kim Honey
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Poster Comment:
I remember my mother making mock apple pie when I was a kid and we were poor.
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