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Rabbit Cake
(Germany.) Boil a rabbit in water with onions, carrots, herbs, etc., using this broth for soup and cutting up the meat of the rabbit. Chop it very fine; add 1 cup of mashed potato, 1 onion chopped in butter, 1/4 pound of beef tongue, parsley, thyme, and seasoning. Chop well, and add 1 cup of white stock; arrange on a dish in a mound and put bread-crumbs over and bits of butter. Bake till brown and serve with mushroom or tomato sauce.
A thrifty two-in-one dish: the rabbit gives up a broth for soup, and the boiled meat is rebuilt into a browned mound. The original assumes you know what temperature to bake at and what holds the mixture together, so both need filling in.
- The hinge: bind it properlyA cup of mashed potato and a cup of stock is a loose mixture, and it will slump on the dish unless the potato is stiff and the stock is added by degrees. Add the stock a few spoonfuls at a time until the mass just holds a shape when pressed, then stop; leftover stock is no loss.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Everything in the mixture is already cooked, so the bake is really for browning rather than cooking through. Use 400F and give it 25-30 minutes, until the crumbs are deep gold and the mound is hot at the centre.
- The rabbitA farmed rabbit of 2.5-3 lb dressed yields somewhere around a pound or a little more of picked meat, which suits this quantity of potato and stock well enough. Simmer it gently for 45-60 minutes rather than boiling hard; wild rabbit is leaner and tougher and may want 90 minutes.
- White stockAn unroasted stock made from veal or poultry bones, pale rather than browned. The rabbit's own cooking liquid, strained and reduced a little, serves perfectly and saves opening anything.
- Beef tongueThe recipe must intend tongue already cooked, since nothing in the method would cook it; cured and pressed tongue, sold by the slice, will serve. It is there for salt, colour and a firmer bite against the soft rabbit; chop it small rather than mincing it to paste.
- "Chop it very fine"Hand-chopping gives a texture with some grain to it. A food processor will turn boiled rabbit into a smooth paste in seconds, so pulse briefly if you use one, or the mound bakes up pasty.
- Season for boiled meatMeat simmered in plain water gives up much of its soluble savour to the broth and tastes flat on its own. Taste and season the mixture before it goes in the dish, not after.
- YieldServes four as a main course with the tomato or mushroom sauce and a green vegetable, or six as one course of a longer meal.
The book files this one under Germany, where reworking boiled meat into a baked, crumbed mound seems to have been standard domestic practice rather than a named specialty; German cookbooks of the period offer Auflauf preparations of this kind, and English-language writers seem to have been ready enough to label something shaped and baked in a dish a "cake". The logic is economy: a single rabbit yields a soup and a second course, with a quarter pound of cured tongue standing in for the seasoning and richness the meat lost to the pot. Rabbit was ordinary food across nineteenth-century Europe, cheap enough to be a weekday meat, and its disappearance from most Anglophone tables is a twentieth-century development rather than a reflection of how the animal was ever regarded in the kitchen.