A brief historical inquiry into the origins of delicious mock chicken

Writing about Orange’s much-loved local delicacies, Middleton’s Ice blocks, in a recent issue, got me thinking about my hometown’s own unusual food obsession — mock chicken.

In Bourke, mock chicken is a must-have staple at any barbecue and has been, I’ve been reliably informed, since they first appeared in the local butcher shop window in 1957.  I can’t definitively say what Bourke’s mock chicken is made of, I just know that it contains no chicken. It is essentially minced meat (pork and/or veal or beef maybe?), shaped in a mould to resemble a chicken drumstick, crumbed and then a wooden stick inserted in place of a bone. Cooked on a barbecue or frypan, baked in the oven or deep-fried — any which way you like, they are delicious!

But mock chicken is virtually unknown anywhere outside of Bourke (although Dubbo has now caught on) and I’ve had a lifetime of seeing people’s confused expressions at hearing the words and then their deep suspicion when you explain further what they are.

Mock cream, most people know of and have possibly tried in a cream bun or apple turnover. And readers of Alice in Wonderland will even know of mock turtle soup*:

"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.

Despite being a modern rarity, a quick search through the National Library of Australia’s amazing online resource, Trove, returned thousands of newspaper references and even recipes for mock chicken, dating as far back as 1875 (a recipe for mock chicken fricassee made from boiled veal shank).

But, even better, my research on Trove led me to a genuine authority on the history of mock foods — food historian at the University of Wollongong, Lauren Samuelsson.

A food-lover and keen cook herself, Lauren’s area of study for her PhD thesis was the archives of the Australian Women’s Weekly magazine and how it changed the way we ate over the course of the 20th century. 

During the 1930s and 1940s there was a boom in recipes for all sorts of mock foods, Lauren said, and she has even published an academic paper on the topic: ‘The imitation game: Mock Foods in the Australian Women's Weekly, 1933-82’.

“It was mostly in response to when things were either scarce or really expensive,” Lauren explained.

“So when, during the War, people couldn't get potatoes, they couldn't get beef, they couldn't get all of these different types of things, they would make mock versions of those, because obviously, things like potatoes were really important to people's diets and they really didn't know what to do without them.”

In the pages of the Women’s Weekly during the period you find recipes for everything from mock Christmas ham and mock apple pie to mock eggs, mock oysters and even mock pate de fois gras. 

But of all the mock food recipes in the pages of the Women’s Weekly, Lauren said that mock chicken was by far the most popular.

“It was because chicken was so expensive,” she said. “Before we had factory farming people didn't really buy chicken unless it's a really special occasion, Christmas and things like that. So chicken was really expensive, really special and so people made mock versions of it.”

There were numerous different recipes for mock chicken published in the Women’s Weekly, some made with minced meat — as are the mock chicken legs I’m familiar with — others made using rabbit or tripe.

But why would you cook rabbit and call it mock chicken?

“Because rabbit was really looked down upon, especially after the depression,” Lauren explained

“And so it got this connotation around it that rabbit was poor people's food and so by turning it into mock chicken, you are making it into rich people's food.”

Mock chicken pies were a popular way to disguise cheap protein sources like rabbit or tripe, but there were also other more unusual ways to prepare mock chicken for the table.

“Mock chicken mould combines two of my favourite things about early 20th-century food, which is jelly and also mock food,” Laren said.

“So it was generally rabbit and they would put it into jelly with various vegetables and sort of layer it and make it look really lovely, and then turn it out and eat a slice of this rabbit jelly…. It's not good. I made a chicken one and it is not tasty — not to my palate anyway!”

The popularity of mock chicken recipes fell sharply during the 1950s and 1960s, when industrial-scale farming made real chicken readily available and affordable.

It was a big change in the way we ate, said Lauren, who includes an incredible statistic in her paper, that during the 1930s and 1940s, the average Australian consumed 4.4 kilograms of chicken a year, but that had skyrocketed to 21 kilograms a year by 1984.

While these mock food recipes may not appeal to today’s appetites, Lauren said it demonstrates the incredible creativity of Australian housewives of the period and the care they took to put a quality meal on the table, giving lie to the ‘meat and three veg’ stereotype.

“Yeah, they definitely were creative in the boundaries that they had because we have to remember that in 1950s Australia, we didn't have access to all of these amazing ingredients that we have today, so they were being really creative,” she said.

“Even when it comes to something like that layered jelly salad, it would have looked absolutely amazing and people put time and care into it and just because it doesn't make my mouth water, it doesn't mean that they didn't enjoy it.”

The history of food and looking back at what people ate and how they ate is a rich area of study, Lauren said, and one that is, deservedly, gaining more interest

“While looking at war and stuff is important obviously, really what we do in everyday life has more influence on us over the entire course of our lives,” she said.

“What we eat and what we drink and why we do that can tell us a lot about wider culture and society and all of the things that make us who we are.”

*Lauren said mock turtle soup recipes called for boiling a sheep or cow's head.