Home › Meats and Entrees › Mock Rabbit
Mock Rabbit
(A German supper dish.) Mix 1 pound of raw chopped beef, and as much lean veal, also chopped, with 4 eggs, 1 cup of bread-crumbs, a little salt, pepper, nutmeg, parsley, thyme, and a spoonful of onion juice. Beat all well, and shape on a dish into an oval loaf. Cover with egg and bread-crumbs; put in a pan lined with slices of pork; baste it in oven while baking it, and about 40 minutes. Serve hot or cold and in slices.
This is a German meatloaf under an English name, and it behaves like one. The original omits an oven temperature and assumes you know how to keep a loaf from drying out.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified. 350F suits a loaf of this size; hotter and the egg-and-crumb coating browns hard before the centre sets.
- Forty minutes is shortTwo pounds of meat in a free-standing oval loaf will need closer to an hour at 350F. Go by an internal reading of 160F at the thickest point rather than the clock, since mixed beef and veal with raw egg through it needs to be cooked through.
- The meat"Raw chopped beef" and "lean veal" mean hand-chopped or coarsely ground. Ordinary ground beef and ground veal work; if veal is hard to find, use pork shoulder for the second pound, as many modern German versions use a beef-and-pork mixture.
- The pork liningThe recipe does not say which cut; thin slices of fresh belly, fatback or salt pork would all fit, and they keep the bottom of the loaf from scorching and supply basting fat. Sliced pancetta or streaky bacon substitutes, but it will salt the dish, so ease off the added salt.
- BastingA loaf shaped on a dish rather than pressed into a tin has a lot of exposed surface. Baste every 15 minutes with the fat in the pan, or add a splash of stock to the pan if the pork renders less than expected.
- Onion juiceA period shortcut for onion flavour without visible pieces: grate an onion and press out the liquid, or use a tablespoon of very finely grated onion. Onion powder is not the same thing and will read as sharp.
- Bread-crumbsThe cup mixed into the meat should be soft crumbs from stale bread, which absorb moisture and keep the loaf tender. Use dry, fine crumbs for the outer coating only.
- Yield and servingAbout two pounds of meat plus binder serves six to eight. It slices far more cleanly cold, so if you want neat slices for a supper table, bake it a day ahead and chill it overnight in the pan.
The name is a literal translation of the German falscher Hase, "false hare" — a chopped-meat loaf whose name is traditionally traced to its being shaped into the long oval of a saddle of hare and larded with pork as a hare would be, standing in for game. It remains a fixture of German home cooking under that name. Its appearance here, labelled simply "(A German supper dish.)," shows how it was placed: the dish is filed under supper rather than dinner, meant to be baked once and eaten twice, hot the first evening and sliced cold the next day. The instruction to serve it cold in slices is the point of it as much as the loaf itself, cold sliced meat being the backbone of the late-Victorian and Edwardian supper table.