Poor Man's Goose

Harriet Wicken The Kingswood Cookery Book c.1900

Poor Man’s Goose

Take a sheep’s heart and liver, wash well, and slice them up; slice up also 1lb. of raw potatoes and one or two onions; butter a pie dish, put in a layer of potatoes, then one of liver and some onion, then some more potatoes, and so on until the dish is full, seasoning each layer with pepper and salt; pour in half a pint of water or gravy, put a piece of buttered paper on top, and bake in a moderate oven for about  two hours.

Australian housewives were continuously asked to exercise thrift and economy in the home. While these notions were a fiscal imperative for those on limited incomes, they were also considered a moral imperative for middle class households. This recipe comes from Harriet Wicken’s The Kingswood Cookery Book. Wicken arrived in Australia in 1886 after having worked as a cookery teacher in London. After teaching cookery classes in Victoria and Tasmania she moved to Sydney, where she was appointed as teacher of cookery and instructor of domestic economy at the Sydney Technical College in 1889. Here, as well as in other technical colleges throughout Australia, she would play an instrumental role in the training of cookery instructors who then went on to teach the new domestic economy courses instituted by education departments across the colonies. She was the author of numerous cookbooks and The Kingswood Cookery Book would go through six editions and be published into the second decade of the twentieth century.