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Rabbit Pie

A savory pie made with rabbit, bacon, liver, spices, and butter, baked with a crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Rabbit and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,448 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Rabbit Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rabbits

  1. Parboil and cut the rabbits into joints.

  2. Chop the livers very fine.

  3. Add the chopped livers to the boiled bacon.

  4. Season with cayenne and mace.

  5. Stuff the mixture into the rabbit joints.

  6. Season the rabbits with pepper and salt.

  7. Place a good piece of fresh butter inside each rabbit.

Assemble and bake

  1. Lay the rabbits in a dish and add enough water to almost fill it.

  2. Cover with a top crust and bake until well done.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Rabbit + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,448 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Rabbit + peppertop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,334 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-pentylpyridine (fat).

  4. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Mace + buttertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,405 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

Mace and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Rabbits
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender and cooked through during the long bake.
Fat bacon
Adds richness and moisture to the stuffing, keeping the lean meat juicy.
Fresh butter
Adds fat and richness, helping the meat stay moist as it cooks.

The step that matters

Cover with a top crust and bake until well done. The crust seals in steam and juices while the rabbit cooks through. Rabbit is lean, so it can dry out if baked too long or left uncovered, and doneness should be judged by the meat itself rather than by time alone.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, pepper, butter):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Sagefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, pepper, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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