This final look at mock food considers the use of one ingredient to create a food that is not locally available, for example, the use of cherries to make Cherry Olives. The Okanagan area of British Columbia has an abundance of cherries in the summer months but olives don’t grow there. It’s not clear when Cherry Olives first became a popular type of pickled fruit, but they appear in almost all of the B.C. Tree Fruits home canning promotional booklets. Most of these booklets are undated but originated in the 1940s and 1950s when BC tree fruits were aggressively promoted throughout BC and the Prairie provinces.
A further look through the old BC Tree Fruits recipe books shows that almost all kinds of fruit were pickled! Grapes are used to create Grape Olives and another recurring recipe is “B.C. Fruit Pickle” that combines peaches, pears, apples, tomatoes, onions and celery.
When I moved to the Okanagan, Cherry Olives was one of the first recipes I tried. They are a little unusual but my guests enjoyed them as an accompaniment to devilled eggs or they could be a hit served with egg salad or salmon salad sandwiches.
That’s it for mock foods for now. There are many more recipes we could share. Hopefully you are now a little more attuned to mock food recipes when you read through old cookbooks and possibly even create some of your own!
