Name: Lapin Rôti
Ingredients: 1 rabbit; coarse sea salt; black pepper; bacon strips; 20 cl poivrade sauce

Why it works: Rabbit and sauce work together. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 330 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Lapin Rôti

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rabbit

Prepare the rabbit by removing the innards and cutting off the hind legs above the joint and the front legs at the first joint.
Make a slit in the nerve of one hind leg to cross the legs for easier skewering.
Thread a string through the eyes and shoulders to secure the head and shoulders against the body.
Cover the rabbit with strips of bacon tied in place.

Roast and serve

Skewer the rabbit and roast it until cooked through.
Remove the string and serve the rabbit on a platter with poivrade sauce.

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.

Rabbit + saucetop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together330 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Rabbit + peppertop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,334 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-pentylpyridine (fat).
Pepper + saucetop 27% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together15,303 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Pepper and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,303 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

Rabbit: Forms the main body of the dish, cooked through by roasting.
Bacon strips: Covers the lean meat, adding fat that bastes it and flavour as it renders.
Poivrade sauce: Serves as the accompanying sauce, adding moisture and savoury flavour at the table.

“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.