Mock Rabbit
1 pound round steak 1/2 pound sausage meat 1 egg 1 onion 1/4 pound salt pork Salt and pepper 3 slices moistened bread Chop or grind the meat. Chop the onion and cook it in the fat tried out of a small portion of the pork; add the bread and cook a few minutes. When cool, mix with the other ingredients except the pork; form into a long, round roll, smoothing it by moistening the hands with cold water. Cut the pork in thin slices; lay them over the loaf and bake for forty minutes in a hot oven. The sausage may be omitted if desired and more seasoning used in its place.
A shaped meatloaf standing in for jugged hare, larded with salt pork instead of the bacon a lean wild rabbit would need. It comes together quickly, but a few of the original's assumptions need translating.
- Oven temperatureA "hot oven" in this period is usually read as roughly 400-450F. Forty minutes at that heat suits a roll of moderate thickness; check the center reads 160F on an instant-read thermometer, since ground meat needs the whole mass brought to temperature, not just the surface.
- Round steak, groundRound is lean, which is why the salt pork and sausage are there. Ask the butcher to grind a pound of round, or buy 85% lean ground beef and accept a slightly softer loaf.
- Salt porkStill sold, usually near the bacon, and it can be very salty. Rinse it, and hold back on added salt until you have tasted the mixture. Thick-cut unsmoked bacon is the closest substitute if salt pork is unavailable.
- "Fat tried out"Trying out means rendering: dice a small piece of the pork and cook it slowly until the fat runs and the scraps brown. Use that fat to soften the onion.
- Moistened breadThree slices of firm white bread, soaked in water or milk and squeezed out. Modern sandwich bread is airier; use three thick slices of a sturdy loaf, or about a cup and a half of fresh breadcrumbs, so the loaf binds rather than turns pasty.
- ShapingThe roll is free-formed on a shallow pan, not pressed into a loaf tin. Wet hands keep the surface smooth, and a pan with sides catches the rendered fat. A rack keeps the underside from stewing.
- Resting and yieldThe recipe gives none. Rest the loaf 10 minutes before slicing or it will crumble. About 1 3/4 pounds of meat serves four to six.
- If the sausage is omittedThe instruction to use "more seasoning" presumably points at the sort of thing sausage carried: sage, black pepper, a little more salt, perhaps a pinch of mace or cayenne. Without it the loaf also loses fat, so keep the full quarter pound of pork.
Mock dishes fill a long stretch of Anglo-American cookery: mock turtle, mock oyster, mock duck, mock apple pie. Some substitute for an expensive ingredient, others for one that was simply out of season, and hare could be both. Wild rabbit and hare were seasonal game, tough, strongly flavored and needing barding with fat because the meat is so lean, which is what the sheet of salt pork here supplies. This is a characteristic sort of entry, taking a cheap cut, extending it with bread, and giving the result a genteel name.