To Bake a Mock Bird

Now that it's freezing out, let's warm up with my favorite variety of community cookbook.

The Grange Cookbook Casseroles Including Breads (1969) is great because it's almost entirely devoted to that "throw-in-everything-plus-a-can-of-cream-soup" genre. Plus breads.

Well, okay, the macaroni chili on the cover doesn't harness the power of cream soup... and I think (HOPE!) the smear of dried something-or-other clinging the back cover of my copy is refried beans... but you get the idea.

As I paged through this book, it seemed that the Grange groups' favorite genre of casserole might be the "mock" variety. Yes, it has the ubiquitous mock chicken:

Though in this case, there's at least a smidge of real chicken from the can of chicken noodle soup.

The counterfeit poultry didn't stop there, though. The book offers a slightly more exotic mock fowl:

You can tell it's classier than mock chicken because it doesn't have potato chip crumbs on top.

The Grange cooks also love mock seafoods, and unlike the mock poultries, these are often vegetarian.

I guess mock  crab in the 1960s was canned corn rather that surimi! (Not sure how corn was supposed to fool anyone.)

And mock oyster consisted of eggplant and soda crackers baked in a mushroom soup custard.

If the usual fake Chinese food of community cookbooks isn't enough, this one even offers a fake fake Chinese dinner:

Yep-- Mock Chop Suey!

Beyond the mock meals, the recipe writers also had weird affinity for soup-soaked french fries:

Or any white-sauce-and-veggified fry-based concoction.

The book is such a cornucopia of weirdness that I wasn't sure where to stop, so I'm just going to cut this off at the genius recipe that combines two of my mom's favorite things in the whole world (in a way that I doubt she will appreciate).