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Rabbit Pudding

A boiled rabbit and bacon pudding made with suet, flour, and stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Rabbit and beef work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 252 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Rabbit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Season the rabbit with pepper, salt, and cayenne.

  2. Cut the bacon into strips.

  3. In a bowl, mix suet, flour, salt, and cold water to form a stiff paste.

  4. Grease a basin and roll out the paste, reserving a small piece for the top.

Assemble and boil

  1. Line the basin with the paste, then add the rabbit and bacon.

  2. Pour in the stock or water.

  3. Roll out the reserved paste to cover the top, wet the edges, and press to seal.

  4. Dip a cloth in boiling water, dust with flour, and tie it over the pudding.

  5. Place the pudding in boiling water and boil for 3.5 to 4 hours.

Serve

  1. Carefully loosen the edges with a knife and turn out to serve.

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 + beeftop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together252 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Pepper + beeftop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Rabbit + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-pentylpyridine (fat).

  5. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Rabbit
Forms the main filling and provides the meat that cooks tender within the pudding.
Beef suet
Adds fat that keeps the filling moist and gives the pastry a rich texture.
All-purpose flour
Forms the stiff paste that sets into a sturdy casing around the filling.
Streaky bacon
Contributes fat and savoury flavour that seeps into the meat as it cooks.

The step that matters

Sealing the pudding before boiling. If the top paste is not wetted and pressed firmly, the seal can open during the long boil, letting water into the filling and making it soggy.

“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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