Blind Hare
1½ pounds of veal cutlet I ½ teaspoonful of grated nutmeg I even teaspoonful of cinnamon 1½ pounds of round steak 4 eggs 2 cups of stale bread crumbs 1 saltspoonful of black pepper 2 even teaspoonfuls of salt Chop the beef and veal very fine. Beat the eggs until thoroughly mixed. Mix all the ingredients well together and form into an oblong loaf, sprinkle with cracker crumbs. Bake in a moderate oven three hours, basting once or twice with melted butter. Serve cold, cut in very thin slices.
A German-style mock hare loaf, meant to be baked once and eaten cold through several hot-weather meals. Two things need attention before you start: the meat quantities as printed, and the three-hour bake.
- The meat quantitiesThe figures for veal and round steak have lost their whole numbers and read as "1/2 pounds" each. Given four eggs, two cups of crumbs and two teaspoons of salt, the loaf was almost certainly built on about 1½ lb of each, for roughly 3 lb of meat total. Scale the seasoning to whatever weight you actually use rather than trusting the printed line.
- Chopping"Chop very fine" means hand-chopped or run through a hand grinder. Ask a butcher for coarse-ground veal and coarse-ground beef round, or grind chuck-fat-free round yourself; commercial fine grind gives a pastier slice.
- Moderate ovenSet 350F. If you bake the loaf free-form on a sheet rather than in a pan, 325F gives a more even result.
- Three hours is far too longA 3 lb loaf of lean beef and veal reaches 160F internal in about an hour to an hour and a quarter at 350F. Cook to the thermometer, not the clock; three hours will leave a grey, crumbly brick that cannot be sliced thin.
- BastingThe mixture has almost no fat in it, which may be why the original calls for basting with melted butter. Brush the loaf two or three times during baking, or lay strips of bacon across the top.
- Crumbs, wet and dryTwo cups of dry stale crumbs with no milk will pull moisture from the meat. Soak them in about ½ cup of milk or stock and squeeze lightly before mixing. The cracker crumbs on the outside are for crust only.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. The nutmeg as printed, a teaspoon and a half, is assertive by modern taste; a teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg is plenty for 3 lb of meat.
- ServingChill the loaf completely, ideally overnight under light weight, before slicing. Three pounds of meat gives ten to twelve cold servings, which is the point of the dish.
"Blind hare" renders a German name for a loaf of chopped meat shaped and baked to imitate a roasted hare; the dish appears in German as both blinder Hase and falscher Hase, "false hare" — the same family of naming as mock turtle soup and Scotch woodcock. The advantage is practical: one long bake, done early in the day or the day before, produced a loaf that kept in a cool larder and could be sliced cold for several meals without lighting the range again. The veal-and-beef mixture, the nutmeg, and the insistence on very thin slices all suggest a German-derived recipe rather than an English cold roast.